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Facebook’s new world domination ploy is a two-megabyte Instagram app tested in India and Brazil

Works just fine on ancient low-end Androids, so now The Social Network™ can monopolise developing nations too!

Facebook has unveiled a new weapon in its world domination plan: a two-megabyte version of its Instagram app.

The new Instagram Lite was built by the same team that coded Facebook Lite and replicates that app’s strategy of offloading functions to the cloud instead of running them on a smartphone.

Facebook has removed animations and augmented reality filters for faces, but says it has “kept features that could deliver joy with less data, like GIFs and stickers.”

The result is code that can run on even very modest hardware: Facebook’s spiel for the new app quotes a user who was able to run it on a Samsung Galaxy S Duos, a device from 2012 that runs Android 4.0.

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The Social Network™ has named India and Brazil as among the target markets for the app, and has made it available in 170 countries. Doing so is completely in line with its plans to win more users in the developing world so that the company can amass a user base in time for ads, e-commerce and other money-spinners to become more prevalent.

Making Instagram more accessible also means that Mark Zuckerberg can replicate the pincer movement he’s conducted in other nations, where users that don’t fancy Facebook can turn to its biggest rival – the Facebook-owned Instagram.

While owning Instagram has earned Facebook an antitrust lawsuit in the USA, the company is renowned for outpacing regulators. And by the time ten or twenty or fifty million new Instagram users are happily sharing selfies in the developing world, government responses won’t matter much to Facebook. ®

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