As first world markets have become saturated with smartphones, the market has started to move on to emerging markets. One of the challenges in those places is the lack of high speed connections, like 4G LTE, that many of us may take for granted. In some areas of the world, users may even be limited to 2G speeds. With more users located in regions with challenging communication infrastructures and slower speeds, app developers have to start taking that into account and optimize their apps for these challenges. Facebook has shared some of the steps they are taking to help users access their News Feed even if they are on a slow connection.
One step that Facebook is taking is the development of an open-source Network Connection Class that helps them determine they type of network a user is utilizing what speeds they are able to achieve. Using that information, Facebook does a better job of fetching stories and photos that may be lower down in the News Feed while a user is still reading something else. This makes the experience flow more smoothly as content is available to load when a user starts scrolling again. That same connection speed information may also result in the News Feed leaning more heavily on status updates and links and pulling back on posts that include videos.
Facebook’s engineers indicate the items to be downloaded on the News Feed now get prioritized more aggressively. One priority is to go ahead and download a story that a user is actually looking at rather than trying to load items further down in the stream. Another step Facebook took is to show stories from a previous session when no connection is present or the connection is particularly poor. They indicated user feedback showed users would rather have something to look at, even if it was old, rather than a blank News Feed.
source: Facebook
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