Twitter started testing Twitter Lite almost a year ago in the Philippines and it was a follow up to the Twitter Lite, which was a Chrome app. Unlike the latter, 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.
Finally Twitter announced that they are expanding the availability of Twitter Lite to more countries on the Google Play Store. It started out in the Philippines then later on expanded to 23 other countries over the course of the months. Now, Twitter says that they are now expanding to 21 more countries which includes Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Yemen, Uruguay, Ukraine, Turkey, Romania, Turkey, Romania, Paraguay, Nicaragua, Morocco, Lebanon, Jordan, Indonesia, India, Honduras, Guatemala, Ghana, 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 round 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. If you were wondering how Twitter Lite compares to the regular Twitter for Android app, check out the comparison I made a while ago here.
