Facebook's Messenger Lite lights up old Android phones

Facebook has a tiny, speedy new messaging app designed for owners of older Android phones.

Facebook Messenger Lite, announced Monday, takes up a much smaller amount of a phone's storage -- just 10 megabytes -- than the full-fat app that most users have installed on their phones, and it has been pared back so that it runs peppily over slower-than-average networks. It is the companion app to Facebook Lite, a stripped-down version of the social network, also for old Android phones, launched in 2015.

The app's launch is one cog in the machinery of Facebook's plan to make the social network and the internet as a whole more accessible to people in the developing world. One of Facebook's stated aims is to bring the next 3 billion people online and it has a number of initiatives to that end, including Internet.org, Free Basics and its Lite apps.