Facebook: 66% of our Android users are 2011-era or older spec hardware
Facebook, like Android, has a massive user base. According to the massive social network’s developer blog, Facebook sees more than 500 million active users every month using more than 10,000 different Android powered mobile devices.
You know what that means right? Lots of different versions of Android (not to mention hardware capabilities) are connected to Facebook, and that means the company has to maintain some structure with its development teams to dedicate some resources in order to ensure each version of the platform interacts properly. This also lets Facebook build common tools so it can “avoid re-inventing the wheel.”
The teams now look at a “year class” of the hardware, and according to Facebook, better than two-thirds of the Android user base is on a hardware equivalent to something released in 2011 or earlier. For a competitive comparison, 2011 is when the iPhone 4 and Samsung Galaxy S II were the banner bearers for the platform.
Seeing this angle of development shows the depth Facebook achieves to ensure a better experience across what is really representative of “mainstream” hardware in the Android ecosystem on a global basis.
Below is an interesting video where Facebook presents the variables discovered as it adopted this practice of looking at Android from a hardware perspective. It is long, nearly an hour, but the first 13 minutes provide a good overall view of the Android landscape for Facebook.
source: Facebook Code Blog
Things that are NOT allowed: