Facebook has emphasized expansion in the developing world, especially through mobile, for the last few years. Drones, satellites, and laser internet are some of the buzzworthy future methods the company has discussed to reach new users in developing markets. But as part of that expansion, through programs like Internet.org and Open Compute, Facebook has also taken a rather less sexy, but rock-solid approach: efficiency.

Android Efficiency: Connecting the Next Five Billion

Last week, the world's largest social media network announced another addition in its world-domination-through-efficiency initiatives, in the form of slimming down and speeding up its Android app for use in places where wireless data is expensive, unreliable, and slow. "In an effort to connect the next five billion, Facebook began to shift to a mobile-first company about two years ago," wrote Facebook Engineering Manager Alex Sourov in the announcement. "We trained hundreds of employees on mobile development, restructured internal teams to build for all platforms, and moved to a fast-paced release cycle."

The announcement comes after a team of product managers and engineers from Facebook traveled to Africa last year to test out mobile performance of its app first hand. The team bought locally available Android devices and examined the performance of the latest version of the Facebook app in several developing countries in the continent.

What they found was not encouraging. According to Sourov, "the testing process proved to be difficult. The combination of an intermittent, low-bandwidth network connection and a lack of memory space on the devices resulted in slow load times and constant crashes." Worse yet, for potential Facebook users in those countries, Facebook's team found that they "burned through [their] monthly data plans in 40 minutes."

"Our trip to Africa really highlighted the importance of our work on mobile performance, data efficiency, networking reliability, and application size for emerging markets," wrote Sourov. So Facebook's engineers have been endeavoring to increase mobile performance and data efficiency ever since. "For example, we found that start times were slower on single-core devices," a common spec for developing-world smartphones, "because too many features concurrently initialized themselves on application startup." So Facebook has reengineered the app to hold off on starting these processes until after startup or, in some cases, until those features are actually called for by the user.

Other improvements to the Android app include lowering the amount of data transmission required for common Facebook features. Using alternate compression formats for photos like WebP, for example, the team lowered the amount of data required for an image download by up to 35 percent compared to the common JPG format, and up to 80 percent compared to PNGs. The team also struck a careful balance between caching frequently accessed photos locally on the devices so it consumed less data, but also reducing the overall size of the app by 65 percent, since Android devices in the developing world have smaller storage capacities.

All of these efficiency improvements are geared towards, as Facebook puts it, connecting the "next five billion" new internet users -- preferably, for the company, to Facebook first. As part of that initiative, Facebook acquired Little Eye Labs -- a small Indian startup that helps analyze Android app data to increase efficiency -- at the beginning of the year.

Latin America: An Indicator of Coming Wave of Android Smartphones

Facebook's emphasis on Android efficiency, in particular, is sound, considering that much of the first smartphones coming to the developing world run some form of Google's OS, rather than Windows or Apple's iOS. As we previously reported, most of Latin America runs Android, with at least a majority smartphone market share in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. In Panama, for example, 80.6 percent of smartphones were Android, according to eMarketer, while even in Latin American countries with more developed middle classes, like Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, iOS devices never crack much above a third of the market share.

Nevertheless, smartphone adoption in Latin America -- one of the leading indicators of the developing world joining the IT revolution -- continues to accelerate. Brazil, for example, saw an 89 percent smartphone sales increase during the first quarter of last year, while Mexico saw a 61 percent point increase in the same period. Across Latin America, there has been an increase of 1 million units sold over the same period in 2012.

While Facebook for Every Phone and similar initiatives to connect feature phone users in the developing world have proven successful, it appears the Android OS on cheap smartphones will be the future of the majority of these new markets for some time, and Facebook is taking steps to be the first and best app running on the next 5 billion devices.

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