You will agree with me that the performance of the official Facebook app for Windows 10 Mobile is wanting although feature wise it is a great app. SlimSocial for Facebook is an attractive alternative to the bloated app for Facebook. It has the ability to launch quickly and reformat your news feed to show the most recent content first unlike the algorithm based Facebook news feed.
You will be glad to know that SlimSocial for Facebook is a UWP app unlike the official app from Facebook. Unfortunately it is currently only available for Mobile Phones only. Although it is a Github project, it is still free and totally ad-free.
Features and options of SlimSocial for Facebook app
The following are the options you will be presented with the app:
- Ability to lock the Facebook bar
- You can reorder posts to show latest new first instead of top news first as is the case with the official Facebook app
- You will be able to hide sponsored posts
- You can choose to center the text of the posts
- Ability to add space between posts
- The app comes with a Dark theme option
- You can easily clear cache
If you have been using the official Facebook app or Facebook Beta app you will realize there is no option to clear cache data. The downside of this is that the app ends up taking a lot of your storage space after a while. If you head over to the Settings app and check the storage space occupied by the Facebook app you will be shocked to find it ranges from a massive 400MB to 900MB. How uncouth for one single app to occupy all that space.
To add salt to injury the download size of the official Facebook app for Windows 10 Mobile is a whooping 278MB. The reason being Facebook has not designed a Windows 10 Mobile app from the ground but rather ported their iPhone app to Windows platform. As if that was not enough blow a Windows Phone user now requires a device with 2GB RAM to run the official Facebook app.
This is in contrast to the SlimSocial app for Facebook which is only 909.2 KB in size. You can say that the SlimSocial app for Facebook is equivalent to the Facebook Lite app available for Android users. Any individual with a Windows Phone device with less than 2B RAM can comfortably use this app to access Facebook. The app developers have also declared that no personal information or private information about you or your device is collected or transmitted by this app. You can check out the code used on their Github page.
Downside of the SlimSocial for Facebook app
The following are some of the features the app lacks as of now:
- The app lacks notifications.
- The app also lacks contact and calendar syncing.
- There is no way to open messages on the Messenger app but rather the messages open within the SlimSocial app
- The app’s Live Tile is not the prettiest
- The navigation bar auto-hides which can be annoying to some users
Given that this is a Github project we are optimistic that with time the developers will incorporate those features. For the Facebook hardcore funs you might need to run the SlimSocial app alongside the official Facebook app if you do not want to miss out on these features. As for the casual Facebook users the SlimSocial app will prove to be just sufficient.
