There is life after Facebook: these are the best Facebook app alternatives
by: KRIS CARLON
4 HOURS AGO
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Facebook app uninstall
Don’t worry, I’m not suggesting anything as earth-shattering as quitting Facebook. Just quitting the official Facebook app. Among tech aficionados, the Facebook app is the one app you would never put on a new device because of how bloated and resource-hungry it is, but there are plenty of folks out there that do have it installed. However, a recent ground-swell of anti-Facebook sentiment is seeing more and more people try life without the official app, and liking what they see.
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The main things Facebook is accused of doing is taking up too much space (the official app is 40 MB), consuming too much RAM, causing persistent wakelocks, background processes draining battery and generally being the root of all evil. There’s surprisingly little factual evidence around for all these claims, but there is certainly no shortage of anecdotal evidence that Facebook is the primary cause of a sluggish Android experience. For every one of these claims there’s usually another that states uninstalling the app leads to near-instantaneous performance improvements.
Whether you find your system performance to be so bad that something must be done, you simply want a faster and more streamlined Facebook experience or you just want to know the truth for yourself, there’s certainly no harm in uninstalling Facebook for a while.
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Facebook app alternatives
The first thing you’re going to need to do is find yourself a Facebook app alternative. Assuming the main reasons you uninstalled Facebook was to kill its battery-draining, background process-using, resource-chewing habits, then you’re probably going to want something lighter, leaner and faster. Considering how bad the Facebook app is, that isn’t very hard to do. Fortunately, it’s not that hard to find an equivalent Facebook experience elsewhere.
Google Play is full of alternative Facebook apps, but in all honesty, most of them are not very good. I’ve tried pretty much all of them and generally return to the same three or four solutions, which I’ll list for you below. The good news about all of these is that none of them auto-play video ads in your stream either.
Google Chrome best Android web browsersGoogle Chrome
[Price: Free]
Using a Google Chrome “web view” shortcut is probably the lightest and fastest option around. Since September last year, when you sign into Facebook in Chrome, you’ll see a popup requesting permission to let Chrome send you Facebook notifications. Saying yes to this request means that you can now get Facebook push notifications via the browser, making the Facebook app redundant.
Simply open Facebook in Chrome on your device and log in. When the Chrome request appears at the bottom of the screen, tap Allow. Now, tap the Chrome overflow menu button and tap Add to Home screen. You’ll get an admittedly large Facebook icon added to your home screen that will take you straight to your web version of Facebook in Chrome and you’ll still get push notifications like normal.
