Facebook currently has over 1.2 billion users around the world, but that doesn’t mean that the social media giant will stop there. The company has now started to shift its focus to parts of the world that do not have access to high speed internet, and thus find it difficult to easily access Facebook.

Their first step is to release a new Android app for those in emerging countries. The new Facebook Android app uses 50% less data and is 65% smaller.

The news comes in the form of a blog post from Facebook Engineering Manager, Alex Sourov.  Facebook reportedly sent a team of engineers to Africa in order to gauge how their normal app performed.

“We purchased several different Android handsets to test the latest version of the Facebook app — and the testing process proved to be difficult,” said Saurov in the post. “The combination of an intermittent, low-bandwidth network connection and a lack of memory space on the devices resulted in slow load times and constant crashes. We even burned through our monthly data plans in 40 minutes.”

The team worked to improve the app’s performance, data efficiency, networking, and application size. After the work was completed, the team had reduced start times by over 50%, data usage by 50%, reports of slow or failed image loads by 90%, and the overall size of the app by 65%.

The team did encounter a number of obstacles along the way. Solutions included using an alternate compression format for image transmission, loading images at a lower resolution and fine-tuning the process that the app uses to cache images.

Facebook’s monthly active users in the US and Canada grew by 7 million in the first quarter. Users in developing markets, including Africa, grew by 68 million in the same period.