Facebook’s Instant Articles are coming to Android

Five months after announcing its Instant Articles feature, Facebook has extended the offer to iPhone users, with support for Android coming soon.

Instant Articles load immediately as soon as they are tapped. This is possible because Facebook hosts the article directly within its app and doesn’t send users to the publisher’s website when they tap them. (AFP)

Facebook's Instant Articles feature, which allows users to tap on links in their newsfeed to instantly open them, is now live for iPhone users around the world, and it's coming to Android later this year. Facebook has released a public beta for Android users.

Users of the Facebook for iPhone app will now see a lightning bolt icon in the corner of some stories shared on their News Feed, indicating that those articles will load ten times faster when tapped.

Back in May, Facebook teamed up with nine news publishers including BuzzFeed, National Geographic, and the New York Times, to launch the feature, which allows them to publish articles directly on the network's new feeds for faster loading.

This is possible because Facebook hosts these articles directly in its app, instead of sending users to publishers' websites.