Instant Articles is the social network giant's new way for publishers to create instantaneous and immersive articles on Facebook. It leverages the very same technology used to display photos and videos fast within the Facebook app, optimizing them so that they will load as much as 10 times faster than the standard web browser. However, Instant Articles was only available on iPhones. But now, the social network giant has made the feature available on Google's mobile platform.
Recently, Facebook has made its fast-loading Instant Articles readily available on all Android phones globally after the social network conducted a public test phase this October. In retrospect, Instant Articles first hit testing phase on Facebook's iPhone app, and has been live across 100 percent of iPhones since October.
Facebook claims that Instant Articles load 10 times faster than standard article pages and have far more superior sharing probabilities. With the feature coming into the Android segment, Instant Articles will most likely reach majority of users running the most popular mobile operating system today.
"This program is now on Android which really just completes the major mobile platforms that publishers want to reach around the world," Facebook Instant Articles product manager, Michael Reckhow, said in an interview with BuzzFeed News. "With this scale, it's going to be really exciting to see the engagement that publishers are getting."
The social network giant first launched Instant Articles with its plans to improve the Facebook app user experience. Users often had to wait a couple of seconds until an article they click gets fully loaded on the standard mobile web browser.
Facebook had offered publishers an option where the social network would host the articles they publish in order for them to load faster, thereby giving them the chance to sell ads within the articles, or even sell the advertisements themselves and give the publishers a cut of the profit.
