Facebook’s Internet.org App: a review from Tanzania
Facebook’s Internet.org effort started with a simple idea: to get the rest of the world online. When Facebook succeeded in reaching its first billion active users, founder Mark Zuckerberg launched Internet.org, an ambitious project to get the remaining 5 billion potential internet users online. According to the World Bank, only 5% of the population in Tanzania use the internet, so it makes sense that this was one of the early locations chosen to pilot the Internet.org app. On a recent trip to Tanzania, I had the chance to try out the app in a ‘relevant environment,’ as we used to say at NASA. While there are major areas that still need to be built out, I was impressed by the performance of the app in low connectivity conditions.
Getting started
In order to use the app, you have to go with Tigo as your mobile network subscriber, the third place provider in the Tanzania market. Over the years I have found Tigo to provide decent service in Tanzania, but on this trip to Dar es Salaam and Morogoro, it was disappointing in terms of mobile internet (Facebook says that Tigo increased smartphone sales by 10x following the introduction of the app, so perhaps they are victims of their own success). To be fair, I have noticed a general deterioration in the quality of mobile data all over East Africa, no doubt a result of the rapid growth in internet usage and infrastructure that can’t keep up. In any case, installation of the Internet.org app was quick and easy. At 700 KB it’s a compact install compared to Facebook, coming in at 25 MB, but more than Facebook’s Lite App, intended for low bandwidth users.
Using the app
The app has a calming purple color palette and opens with a terms of service page and options to change from English to Kiswahili. Once you’re in the app, the icon tray on the phone cleverly changes to “Free Data” to remind you that the services are free. Then you see a list of free services available, as well as a link to your Tigo account. The account section never worked for me, presumably because I wasn’t using a Tigo phone. Or perhaps it was because I already had a data bundle? In any case, the list of free services was impressive.
You could roughly divide the content into these groups:
- News and weather (BBC, local newspapers, Accuweather)
- Health and wellness (simple public service fact sites about Ebola, maternal health, HIV)
- Sports
- Jobs
- Wikipedia
Hits
All of the Internet.org sites have to be generated using very simple static HTML pages in order to get onto the app, but they can include a few basic controls, like dropdowns or search boxes. It is reminiscent of the internet of the late 1990's. While I expected this to be very limiting, several of the sites handled it quite well. Maybe this is because of the old adage that creativity flourishes in an environment with severe limitations. Or perhaps it says something about how bloated the modern web has become.
For example, when I opened the BBC news page, it opened immediately as did the linked articles. As an experiment, I then tried to open the BBC website in the Chrome browser. Tried is the key word here, since the site literally could not open in a meaningful way. It was packed with junk that has nothing to do with my purpose of reading the news — videos, animated ads, who knows what else — and I was never able to actually click and open an article. An environment that forces web developers to restrain their use of all this crap seems to have solved the low bandwidth problems that many of them are probably not aware of unless they visit Tanzania and find out for themselves.
The wikipedia site clearly benefited from a lot of attention by Facebook’s developers, since it behaves more like a mini-app than a site. It is the only one that included a slide-out menu and obviously a fair amount of work had to go into making complex wikipedia pages display efficiently in the app. The result is impressive, and I was surprised to see that some images are displayed in wikipedia entries, even while using free data. Unfortunately, the menu options don’t all seem to work, including Nearby, which seemed intriguing but did nothing when pressed.
Finally, I was impressed by several of the informational apps, including a nice local job search site called BrighterMonday that was well-stocked with job announcements. Several of the health apps were well designed and had engaging content, most notably the Ebola site from UNICEF and the BabyCenter MAMA site. My guess is that these sites come in a distant second to the sports and news sites in terms of page views, but it’s nice to see this sort of content represented.
Misses
Many of the local news and sports sites just didn’t work on the app at all. That is unfortunate since these sites are actually the ones produced using local developer talent and content providers. These local sites could probably use a lot more support, since the health sites are clearly receiving external funding from donors with deep pockets and as a result work well. Also, it’s nice that they included a weather app, but in order for there to be accurate forecasts the Tanzanian meteorology sector is going to need modern radar equipment and computers for running models. Otherwise, you’re left with the somewhat comical opening page of the Accuweather app, which displays a satellite image of the entire continent of Africa.
The Controversy
You may already be aware that there is a raging debate going on now about whether Facebook’s approach infringes on net neutrality. This started when Internet.org expanded to India, prompting some news partners there to rebel against the notion of Facebook deciding what content is valuable enough to merit #zerorating, a term denoting content that is free of mobile data charges. This is concerning in light of recent study that showed millions of mobile phone users in emerging markets think that Facebook is the entire internet. Zuckerberg quickly responded, outlining his argument for why some internet is better than no internet, and why he thinks that net neutrality and free services can coexist.
The debate will continue, and I don’t really take a position in this post other than to point out that much of the mobile internet is seriously broken for users in developing countries because it assumes high bandwidth and powerful processors in every mobile device. Also, mobile network providers seem to be enjoying the cover provided by an evil internet giant, as they have been charging unreasonably high prices for their increasingly poor quality internet service for years now, and many have zero-rating schemes of their own. As a provider of software designed for poor connectivity, I am most interested in how apps like Internet.org make the internet more accessible and affordable. Affordable does not necessarily have to mean free, and it’s entirely possible that Facebook will do away with zero-rating altogether.
Final Thoughts
Leaving aside the debate about whether free services are a backdoor way for Facebook to be the internet for billions of new internet users, the most fascinating thing to me was the excellent low-bandwidth performance of the Internet.org app. While Facebook clearly made an effort to select a wide range of local content — health info, jobs, and local news — truly local content will need more support until it is commercially viable based on ad revenues or other monetization strategies. But given the severe infrastructure limitations right now on internet performance in East Africa, the unique design of this app succeeds in actually making the internet work again for many types of content.
