Twitter Lunches 'Lite' Web App That Consumes Less Data

Twitter has launched a data-saving mobile website called Twitter Lite. Although available worldwide, the new mobile website is mostly targeting users in emerging markets where high-speed network connections are limited or non-existent.

Twitter Lite can easily be accessed on mobile web browsers at mobile.twitter.com. The website minimizes data usage, is able to load quickly on slow network connections and will only take up less than 1MB on users’ devices.

“We also optimized it for speed, with up to 30% faster launch times as well as quicker navigation throughout Twitter,” the company said on its blog. “Twitter Lite provides the key features of Twitter—your timeline, Tweets, Direct Messages, trends, profiles, media uploads, notifications, and more. With Twitter Lite, we are making Twitter more accessible to millions of people—all you need is a smartphone or tablet with a browser.”

The Twitter Lite website also features an extra data saver mode. It reduces mobile data consumption by only providing previews of images and videos alongside information on how much data they would consume when fully loaded. Photos and videos will only fully load when users tap on one of them. Twitter said that this could reduce data usage by up to 70 percent.

Twitter Lite also comes with other useful features when it’s being used on modern web browsers like Google Chrome on Android devices. For example, users will be able to receive push notifications and add Twitter Lite to a device’s home screen.

Overall, Twitter Lite functions pretty similarly to a full blown app, but it’s actually what’s called a Progressive Web App (PWA). Twitter stated that it worked alongside Google to develop Twitter Lite, which might also explain why push notifications only function on Android devices and not on iOS.

Twitter has been struggling to keep up with Facebook’s 1.9 billion users. The company believes that the primary reason why it’s having such a difficult time with growing its user base is because of how much data the Twitter app and website requires, leaving some parts of the world uninterested.

“We didn’t feel like we were reaching these other countries well enough, and this will allow us to do it faster, cheaper and with a better experience than we’ve had before,” Twitter’s VP of product, Keith Coleman, told Reuters.

Twitter is primarily targeting India’s 1.3 billion population. The launch of Twitter Lite also coincided with the start of the Indian Premier League’s Twenty20 cricket tournament. Cricket is one of the most popular sport in the country.