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Social media giant Twitter has just announced that it has launched Twitter Lite, a more streamlined and less data-hungry version of its mobile website.
According to the official announcement, Twitter said that despite smartphone adoption growing to "3.8 billion connections by the end of 2016, 45% of mobile connections are still on slower 2G networks." This resulted in the launch of Twitter Lite, which is aimed mainly at these emerging mobile markets without 4G connectivity, and slow and unreliable wireless networks.
Twitter Lite will provide all the main features of the Twitter app including timeline, Tweets, Direct Messages, trends, profiles, media uploads, notifications, and more, but it'll take up less than a megabyte of space. It also features a further data-saving mode that will blur out any images or videos until the user taps on them to view them. It will also work offline so users will be able to continue using the app even if their connection drops out, though obviously they won't get access to new tweets.
According to Twitter, Twitter Lite will be able to load to a usable level in under 30 seconds on most 3G devices, and says that in addition to loading faster, it will use around 40% less data in normal use, and up to 70% less when the data-saving mode is turned on. Being less power hungry than the official app, we imagine it could also be a battery-saving method of using Twitter too. This should, Twitter says, make it "more affordable for you to use Twitter in areas where mobile data is expensive."
Twitter isnt the first one to take this step, as Facebook and YouTube already have their versions up for a while now. However, this could attract more people to the platform.
This article was originally published on tbreak and has been reposted on Entrepreneur Middle East based on a mutual agreement between the websites.
