Now You Can Use Facebook Without the Internet

It is such a pain when using the Facebook application in areas with no internet access, such as underground subways and remote areas with no cell phone towers or routers. This won’t stop Facebook from taking a step towards their goal of providing their services. Facebook has just released features which allow users to use their app even when offline.

The Menlo Park based company announced that users will be able to see posts on the news feed even in areas with poor connectivity. New stories will be retrieved and downloaded from Facebook’s server when a user is online. As soon as a user goes offline, the user will be able to interact with the stories already downloaded. The app will show the stories based on Facebook’s news relevance algorithm. This implies that the app ranks the new stories as the news feed is viewed.

“In the past, if you were on a poor internet connection or had no connection, you might need to wait for stories to load when you opened News Feed. We are now testing an update in which we look at all the previously downloaded stories present on your phone that you have not yet viewed, and rank them based on their relevance. We also factor in whether the images for the story are available. This way we can immediately display relevant stories you haven't seen yet, instead of showing a spinner while you wait for new stories. When we receive new stories from the server when you're back online, we load and rank those stories normally,” Facebook said.

Users will also be able to comment on posts, like, unlike and upload photos & videos while they are offline. The content will be temporarily saved on the app, and will be posted once a user is online.

"These changes will help anyone who is on a poor internet connection — even those whose network connectivity is generally good but who have intermittent connections in places like subways and tunnels, or at large events," Facebook wrote in a blog post.

In October of 2015, the Facebook app was updated to detect users with slow network connections. The app showed already-downloaded posts to the user in such a case. Facebook also launched an advertising format where users with 2G connections can view slideshows instead of videos.

Although this concept might be a good idea, it will be a hassle to users who take battery life very seriously. The features mentioned in the update will be released slowly over time.