Spotify Lite For Android Saves Data But Doesn’t Have Premium Features

A lot of popular apps have their own “lite” versions that are designed to consume less data and storage space. Music streaming service Spotify is currently testing its own Lite app, but it’s missing a lot of premium features.

Spotify Lite was first spotted by Android Police. This version of the app is only officially available for users in Brazil as part of a beta test. Spotify Lite is focused on saving storage, which is why the app is only 15MB in size. In comparison, the normal Spotify app is around 100MB in size. Another key feature of the Spotify Lite app is that it comes with a tool that lets users track how much data they’re consuming while streaming music.

The mobile data tracker is viewable from the Settings menu and it even lets users set a monthly data limit ranging from 250MB up to 3GB of data. That sounds like a great way of limiting data consumption, but it does have a bit of a disadvantage. Spotify Lite doesn’t allow users to download music for offline listening. The app won’t allow it even if users are connected to a Wi-Fi network.

Spotify Lite also doesn’t have extreme quality playback for music, which seems like an understandable thing to do if users are really serious in saving on data consumption. What doesn’t make sense here is that Spotify Connect, which allows users to stream music to other wireless audio devices, is missing from the app as well.

For Spotify Premium subscribers, if they use the Lite app, they won’t be allowed to play the songs they want and all playlists are only playable in shuffle. This seems like an unreasonable thing to do, even for a Lite version of the app. Spotify may have sacrificed a lot of premium features in order to bring the app size down to just 15MB.

“At Spotify, we routinely conduct a number of tests in an effort to improve our user experience. Some of those tests end up paving the path for our broader user experience and others serve only as an important learning. We aren’t going to comment on specific tests at this time,” a spokesperson from Spotify told TechCrunch.

Spotify Lite is still in beta and some of those missing features might actually be part of the final version of the app, which could be released worldwide in the near future. The app is only being tested in Brazil and users in the country will be able to download and install it from the Google Play Store. For those curious to try it out for themselves, there’s an APK Mirror of Spotify Lite available online.