About a year ago, Twitter started testing Twitter Lite The Philippines and it was a follow-up to the original Twitter Lite, which was a Chrome app. Unlike the Chrome app, the Twitter Lite app was an Android app that aimed to bring a stripped version of the main app that has the basic features that could appeal to those markets that feature people who don’t buy a lot of data and have relatively poor network coverage.
Recently, Twitter announced in a blog post that they are expanding the availability of Twitter Lite to more countries on the Google Play Store. It started out in The Philippines and later expanded to 23 other countries over the course of the months.
Now, Twitter says that they are now expanding to 21 more countries which including Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Yemen, Uruguay, Ukraine, Turkey, Romania, Turkey, Romania, Paraguay, Nicaragua, Morocco, Lebanon, Jordan, Indonesia, India, Honduras, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Belarus and Argentina.
Twitter Lite was specifically designed to target a certain subset of the population and you can know that from its features. It has a data saver option to let you control what you load on the site and optimized for 2G & 3G networks. It also has some features you see on the main app like night mode and threads and new this time around is letting you have push notifications like the Twitter Lite Chrome app.
This is good for Twitter as they try to convince users who have limited resources to use their network more and having a Lite app is a popular strategy. We have seen this with Facebook with their Lite versions of their main apps and even some networks like LinkedIn have them. The Twitter Lite app is smaller than 1MB. To be precise, it weighs around 500 to 600KB. For those who are not familiar with file sizes, 1MB is equal to 1024KB. The main Twitter app, on the other hand, has a size of 25MB.
Twitter Lite is relatively faster and uses less amount of data as compared to the standard app. It’s lighter and even launches faster. While using the app, you won’t feel much difference between the two apps.
