Facebook is getting India's patent on innovation to offer mobile phones universal support

Social media giant Facebook has granted an Indian patent for its invention, which is related to device, system, and method for adapting the information services, software, and code to conform to individual device parameters for enabling proper viewing on their mobile phones. The latest patent gain gives a leg-up to Facebook's efforts to provide universal support to a wide variety of mobile phones, without having to compromise with the quality of the service.

Social media giant, Facebook received the patent from the Chennai patent office on 3 March 2020, at a time when the information service and content providers are determined to accommodate the technological variety on the screens of the mobile devices by providing the users the universal support for all the devices without compromising on the functionality and appearance. It filed the application named 'device, system, and method for providing distributed online services' in the year 2011.

Facebook, in its patent document, said the invention comprises a system, device, and method for running the mobile applications, which includes a server and a client installed across the mobile device. The client connects to the server through a network, receives user input, displays content, and sends user input to the server. As a result, the server uses the client to receive the user input and displays the content for running the applications for the mobile device.

As per the document, the mobile devices come in with the thousands of software and hardware varieties having different screen solutions, operating systems, and input controls. One way to provide universal support is by porting, which has got numerous disadvantages, which include being time-consuming and costly. Porting is a procedure, in which software and code is adapted to conform to computing environment different from that for which software was originally designed.

For instance, to display the website code on the screen of a mobile device, which has an unlike browser than that for which the code is written, the website code may be altered to comport with the capabilities and the requirements of the different browser. Multiple versions of a service solution must be generated with the variations to match the specific software and hardware combinations, which exist on the target mobile devices. At present, using the lowest common denominator of the function, as default, is a standard solution for providing the universal service in the technologically diverse world of mobile devices.

Online service providers use wireless application protocol websites, which necessarily are adaptations of their regular websites with reduced, cut-down versions of content, features, and functionality. Facebook submitted that to take advantage of advanced capabilities, parallel versions of the service must be developed, checked, and maintained.