Facebook’s Messenger Lite is actually really good

If you’ve ever read praise for Facebook products on The Verge, it won’t have come

from me. I’m baffled by the design of the company’s website, aggravated by the pushy data-thirsty ways of its apps, and unimpressed by the contrived niceness of its founder and boss. In short: Vlad Savov, not a Facebook fan. But, for the first time, I am a fan of a particular offshoot of Facebook and that’s the Messenger Lite chat application that recently rolled out to Android phones in the US, UK, Canada, and Ireland. It’s good. Shockingly good. Internet messaging is one of those things that has been undergoing reinvention pretty much since the internet began. Last week we were reminded of the existence of AIM just long enough to reminisce about our youthful indiscretions on AOL’s messenger before its overdue termination in December. Before Facebook owned the messenger.com domain, it belonged to Microsoft, whose MSN Messenger was once a rival to AIM. There have been various reasons for why every popular messaging platform has eventually waned in popularity, but top of my list of reasons has always been the bloatification of a simple thing into an unnecessarily convoluted mess.                                                                         https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/9/16446626/facebook-messenger-lite-hands-on