Facebook Messenger for iOS Gets a Major Overhaul, Promises to Be Smaller and More Responsive

Facebook has started rolling out a new simpler version of its Messenger app on iOS. The world's largest social media platform announced on Monday that it has started rolling out a "faster, smaller, and simpler" version of its Messenger app for iOS users. The new app will be available to all users over the next several weeks. In order to make the app faster, Facebook has rewritten the codebase for Messenger from the ground up. While the new app is faster, it also effectively hides bots and the Discover tab.

In a blog post, announcing the new version of Messenger for iOS, Facebook said it has reduced the app's core code by 84 percent, bringing it down to 360,000 lines of code from more than 1.7 million lines of code earlier. The fresh Messenger app on iOS promises to be lighter and more responsive.

In a status update from his personal profile, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and co-founder of Facebook, said, "Once the rollout is complete, Messenger will be one quarter the size and load twice as fast. When you open Messenger throughout the day, it will feel much faster and more responsive compared to other apps you use."

Facebook's engineering team also explained the app's new version via a blog post. Titled 'Project LightSpeed', Facebook's engineering team rebuilt the architecture and rewrote the app's codebase from scratch. The team called it an "incredibly rare undertaking". The entire project involved more than 100 engineers at Facebook.

There's no doubt users would love an app that's smaller and more responsive. But will it get people to switch from other lighter cross-platform messaging apps to Messenger is what remains to be seen. Facebook has been reportedly working on a unified messaging platform to bring together Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp under a single app for some time now.