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A number of features are being introduced to the Facebook app for Android starting from India, one of the biggest markets for the social networking giant. Beginning from the South Asian country, these features will be rolled out to the rest of the world in the following weeks, the company informed. The list of features includes Voice Posts, Stories Archive, and a cloud storage option. The first is pretty much self-explanatory as the feature allows to add an audio message to a Facebook Story. Voice Posts feature will come handy at times when it’s hard to express in writing or when you wish to express in a local dialect, which often requires a dedicated keyboard app. A colorful background or a photo can accompany such audio stories together with all the available stickers.
Facebook has also added an option to save those ephemeral stories that are too good to vanish within 24 hours. The clips can be saved privately available for a revisit after the said period has expired or even for a re-share at any time in the future. The social media company seems to be investing a major chunk of its resources in the Stories feature to potentially take on Snapchat, which originally created the short-lived posts format. The third addition to the Facebook app is primarily beneficial for the users with entry-level smartphones that usually have limited internal storage. With the new feature, the users will be able to save the photos and videos taken with Facebook Camera directly to their Facebook accounts. This will be a private cloud storage and only the user will have access to the files, unless they choose to share them on Facebook. The cloud storage should also cater to the Stories archive feature that was previously mentioned. Facebook hasn’t clearly stated any storage limit for the said cloud storage feature as of now.
The company adopted the Stories features a few months back to be implemented across all its services, including Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp with an almost identical set of features. Besides this, Facebook was yesterday reported to have significantly increased the budget for its content review initiative to $770 million for 2018 against $150 million in 2016.
