Meta is no longer going to support Messenger Lite—the basic version of its chat app for Android devices.
As 9To5Google reports, the Messenger Lite app has already been removed from Google's Play Store, but existing users can continue to download and use it for now. Opening the app, however, brings up a fullscreen prompt that states "use Messenger to keep chatting."
As of Sept. 18, it seems Messenger Lite will cease to function and the full-fat Messenger app will be required to keep chatting on the platform using your Android device. No chats will be lost in the transition between apps, though.
Back in 2016, when Meta was still called Facebook, the Messenger Lite app was launched for older Android devices which had limited storage space and memory. It was designed to be light on resources, offered a basic set of features for chatting, and promised to work even on slow or unstable connections.
That combination turned out to be a popular reason to use it—no superfluous features and it worked everywhere. For comparison, the Messenger Lite app is less than 10MB in size where as the main Messenger app is 54MB.
Jump forward seven years and even low-end Android devices today have plenty of storage and memory available to run apps such as this. And Meta, understandably, would rather have just one Messenger app to maintain on Android, as well as offering them a much larger range of in-app features (and ways to collect data about its users).
Early this year, Meta started expanding the number of Messenger users communicating with end-to-end encryption turned on by default. Google also enabled end-to-end encryption on RCS group chats this month, and Microsoft rolled out Bing AI chat to third-party browsers last month.