Facebook completely overhauls Messenger on iOS to make it faster and lighter

My favorite type of app update is an update that reduces the bloat. With the new version of Messenger for iOS, Facebook’s done that, and in a big way. 

Instead of shuffling some code around, the company’s engineers actually rewrote Messenger from scratch, reducing its 1.7 million lines of code to a mere 360,000. 

This means the new Messenger is now a smaller download, with smaller updates, that launches faster than before. As Facebook points out, “a faster start time may not matter as much if you only open an app once or twice a day to play a game or watch a movie, but it makes a huge difference when you open an app many times a day.”

More precisely, Facebook claims Messenger now loads twice as fast (compared to the previous iOS version), and is just one fourth of its original size. 

I’ve gotten the new Messenger, and while I did notice it being faster, the rest of it appeared pretty much the same as ever. This, I assume, is because I only ever use Messenger for one simple task: Sending and receiving messages, and an occasional photo. 

It appears that Facebook got the message, too (pun intended). The company says it has streamlined the app by reducing some of the clutter. In one example, the contact list was reduced from 40 versions (wow!) to just one. Some features are temporarily unavailable due to this change, but Facebook says it’ll try to bring them back “soon.”

This may sound like Facebook hasn’t removed a single feature from Messenger, but it’s not quite true. In a more detailed, engineering blog post, the company says it “was important (…) to keep all the most used features.” So some features had to go, and one of them – as reported by TechCrunch in February – was the Discover tab, which highlighted messenger apps and bots. If you’re like me, you won’t miss it much. 

The new version of Messenger for iOS is rolling out on iOS “over the next few weeks.”