Say goodbye to Messenger Lite: Meta is killing the app in September

About 7 years ago, Meta introduced a lite version of its Messenger app to give users the choice to save storage space on their phones. In 2020, the Messenger Lite app was removed from the App Store, becoming unavailable for iOS users. Now, Meta is discontinuing it for Android users as well.

As spotted by 9to5Google, the app is no longer available in the Play Store for new users to download. And some of you who use the Messenger Lite app might have already received the message when opening the app that “Messenger Lite is going away, and will not be available after September 18.” What's important to know is that chat history will not be lost; it will remain accessible within the Messenger app.

Messenger Lite, as the name suggests, is a lighter version of Messenger that is stripped down of many features such as stories, animated stickers, dark mode, or changing a chat's theme. Not having all these features means you can save up on storage space since the size of the app is smaller.

However, it appears that Meta has decided to discontinue this lightweight app and focus solely on the full version. This move might disappoint many users who believe that Messenger drains their battery too quickly or who simply prefer an app version that only enables sending and receiving messages and does not have any additional features or ads, for that matter.

In September, not only will Messenger Lite disappear, but Messenger will stop supporting SMS, which was also not met with a lot of excitement. On the other hand, Meta lets more people enjoy end-to-end encryption on Messenger.

The company began working on end-to-end encryption in 2019 but still tests it and has not introduced it to all its users. Meta's engineers realized that they would need to essentially rewrite the entire messaging and calling code base from scratch, which sure takes time.