Flipkart to team up with Facebook to make its app and website lighter for smartphone users

Flipkart wants to widen its reach among those who consume less data & don't update their apps often

Buffering woes and continuous reminders to update apps always annoy mobile phone users. Considering this factor, Flipkart is working with Facebook to ensure that the company's website and app works smoothly on low-cost smartphones and slower networks.

Flipkart wants to widen its reach among those who consume less data and don't update their apps often. 

Developers from both companies are working on the project via open source to make the website work on low networks i.e. by consuming low data, an Economics Times report said.

The company wants to increase the number of users who access the site on the web, improving its Flipkart Lite mobile site, which doesn't use too much data. Nagaram said the two ways will eventually converge, a concept that its other partner Google is also working on. 

"I am working with Facebook to converge our solution — which allows users to skip updates to apps — and there is a platform called React Native to see if we can share each other's learnings and make one unified product for the developer community to leverage," Amar Nagaram, vice president of engineering at Flipkart was quoted by ET as saying. 

At present, Flipkart uses a twofold strategy where it pushes its app to users of high-end smartphones and offers an app-like experience to those using low-cost smartphones without requiring them to download the app. 

As of September 2016, about half of Flipkart's 100 million registered app users visit the mobile site. At least 70 million who do not have the app use Flipkart Lite, mostly on sub-$100 devices that works on 2G networks.