Facebook has been consistently making improvements to its mobile app to make it easier for users to access features. At the same time, the company has been striving to enhance user experience by making a slew of changes to the design and functionality. Now, Facebook has introduced even more updates that, as claimed, will improve the way users work on slow internet connections. This seems like an important step, especially in a country like India where a majority of users having access to internet are stuck with very slow speeds. Facebooks intends to solve the issues associated with a slow internet connection.
The company is reportedly testing an update which looks at all the previously downloaded stories on a user’s phone and classifies them on the basis of viewed or unviewed and then ranks them in order of their relevance. The new update also takes into consideration whether any images for the stories are available before reordering them.
Facebook mentioned in its official blog post, our mission with News Feed is to connect people with the stories that matter most to them, but if people’s News Feeds aren’t loading because of poor internet connections, we can’t show them the most relevant stories. As a next step in improving people’s experiences on slower internet connections, we are shipping several changes that will more efficiently show you relevant stories in your News Feed when you’re on a slow connection and will let you compose comments on posts when you’re offline.
The facebook app, after this update, will rank relevant and downloaded stories upon its launch. The reordering will take place when the user navigates to news feed, pulls down to refresh stories or while scrolling through news feed. It remains to be seen whether this update will work for all connections or whether facebook will put in some measure to differentiate between slow and fast internet connection. What speed is slow enough for facebook and what isn’t, is entirely subjective. We shall find out about it only after the official launch of the update.