Facebook’s mobile clients are considered one of the most resource-hungry smartphone apps available out there. Their aggressive memory usage has led to many ditching them (including me) and switching to its web counterparts. However, there are some third-party apps available to overcome these issues at a native level and one of such, which we think is the best among these, is “Friendly”.
Friendly is a free iOS and Android third-party Facebook application that embeds most of the features the main app offers in a more cultivated manner. The biggest highlight for everyone will be, of course, its relatively lightweight package in terms of both storage and RAM. Furthermore, it makes use of advanced web containers, hence you can Messenger and Facebook both in a single app unlike what the social network offers. You, obviously, won’t be able to utilize all the standard features such as live streaming but for the majority of users, Friendly should be sufficient.
Furthermore, if you are running low on data, you can completely switch off images and videos in your news feed, and employ an inbuilt adblocker if required. Additionally, there are settings for sorting the news feed based on keywords and time frames.
Personally, my favorite tweak is the “most recent” which bypasses Facebook’s annoying algorithms to show you the most recent posts and the ability to block the “people you may know” section altogether. You can lock the app with the fingerprint scanner if you’ve an iPhone or with a PIN otherwise. Friendly even allows switching between different profiles if you have multiple accounts. Also, you can disable those annoying “stories”. Lastly, there are options for altering themes and the accent colors of the user interface.
Despite not being a native solution, Friendly works flawlessly and if you’re an avid user of the social network, you should definitely give it a try.