Facebook for Android gets Data Saver option, works when on Mobile Data

The Facebook application uses a lot of data for loading news feeds, pictures, video, etc. as we browse through the feeds. Even though you might use it for only a couple of minutes, you will still end up using a lot of data. Up until now, there have been no efforts from the company to help consumers with this issue. But now apparently Facebook is rolling out a data saver option for the same. This is going to be the same as that of the other ones we have seen with the other apps like Netflix etc.

So, when users are browsing via the cellular data/mobile data, the application will give you the option to save the data. So essentially, this will reduce the photo size so that the app has to process fewer data when rendering pictures in the news feed. So there is nothing fancy going on here, it will just reduce the image size, thereby reducing the quality of the image a little. But that is acceptable.

There is a toggle button for the same, using which users will be able to activate this mode and save some of the precious data while browsing through through the news feeds. The option clearly even mentions that the images will appear smaller than the usual in your news feeds. It is unclear at this point if there will be any other option as well for the videos etc. But as of now this is what we have.

It is nice to have something from Facebook finally for this issue for which a fix was long overdue. However, alternatively, users could have also used the Facebook Lite application, if data limitation was an issue. Facebook Lite is a more data friendly version of the main Facebook application. The app was developed initially keeping countries like India etc. in mind, where the data connectivity is limited to 2G in some places.

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This new data saver feature is not available for everyone as of now. Only a few users can see this new option. So if you don’t have this feature yet, then you can download the Facebook Lite application on your smartphone if you want to save some data, loading your news feeds. Meanwhile, stay tuned for more update on the same.