Facebook Messenger vs. Lite – RAM Usage and Storage Space Comparison

Facebook has become an indispensable resource in our daily lives, so it comes as no surprise that it has more users than ever. And almost equally as many of them can be found chatting away on the network’s instant messaging platform, Facebook Messenger. Even though the app was introduced as an optional extension at first and messaging was also integrated in the original Facebook app, Mark Zuckerberg was quite sneaky and eventually forced most of us to download the app in order to keep using the chat on mobile devices.

Even though the Messenger app came from modest beginnings, it is now quite the hefty and robust application. Thus, it takes up quite a bit of storage and uses up some RAM when running as well. So if you want to keep it light, is Messenger Lite the right choice?

RAM Usage

Messenger Lite doesn’t take up a lot of RAM when operating in the background, but still pushes message notifications through without those annoying little chat bubbles. When it’s open, it takes up just 93MB of RAM, and then 59.64MB when running in the background. On top of that, when it’s closed it costs you just 8.76MB in RAM, so it’s as good as it gets.

The original app on the other hand consumes quite a lot. It takes up a whopping 204MB of RAM when open, and then 150.74MB when running in the background. When it’s closed it’s still pretty heavy on the RAM usage, taking up 58MB of your RAM and hogging it for itself.

Storage Space

While the Lite app takes up just 17MB of storage space, the original full Facebook Messenger app occupies a whopping 155MB. So it’s pretty clear that the Lite version is perfect if you want to save up both some RAM and some space.