Facebook is set to introduce its Instant Articles feature in India on November 16, making the country the 1st to get the tool outside of iPhone users located in the US and Western Europe. The brand is gradually rolling out the service only on its Android app for now and requires no update.
Instant Articles made its entry back in May this year. It’s been restricted to the iOS platform till now, so India will be its debut market for Android. The tool showcases feature-rich content within a person’s Newsfeed, sourced from a variety of publishers. Articles load faster as it is hosted within the app, making sure a user doesn’t leave Facebook to read the news elsewhere.
The content comes complete with a high-resolution picture which can be zoomed in on or tilted, an auto-playing video, interactive maps, audio captions, and in-line commenting on particular parts of the article. For its Indian launch, Facebook has tied up with 5 brands consisting of The Hindustan Times, The Quint, The Indian Express, India Today, and Aaj Tak.
The Instant Articles roll out in India has been confirmed by Facebook’s director of news and global media partnerships Andy Mitchell and the service’s product manager Michael Reckhow in an interview with Livemint. They plan to add more publishers early next year based on what type of content is consumed by the public.
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Mitchell and Reckhow said that Instant Articles is debuting on the Android platform in India because the country’s market is stuffed with handsets operating the software. They further assert the OS is designed to be fast, enabling articles to load quickly. According to them, it takes at least 8 seconds for a link to load via the Facebook app.
On the other hand, Instant Articles makes use of technology to load content almost 10 times faster compared to traditional mobile browsers. India is quickly emerging as an important market for Facebook, given the social networking site has a user base totaling up to 130 million in the nation, the 2nd largest one outside of the US.