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There’s no denying that the microblogging platform Twitter is having trouble growing in the US, which is why it is trying to find footing in international grounds. That’s why the company is currently conducting a test of a new app in the Philippines called Twitter Lite. It is meant to load faster and consumes less data, which is perfect for regions with slow internet connections.
A Lite version of Twitter was already introduced to the US market earlier this year, but that particular service applies to its mobile site, The Verge reports. This version that the microblogging service is testing out is an app, which is separate from its main service. Because the app would ideally consume less data, it will have an impact on speeding up load times and charge users less with their plans.
When the company confirmed the existence of the experiment with TechCrunch, Twitter made several clarifications and specifics. The Lite app will supposedly consume 70 percent less data than the normal version and the download size of the app itself will be less than 1MB.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey talked about the Lite version of the social media app back in July during its quarterly earnings call. At the time, he noted how important a smaller, faster version of Twitter is for the company’s future.
“We’ve been working over the past few months on some early foundational work, and Twitter Lite represents one of these,” he said at the time. “One of our goals is to make sure Twitter is accessible to anyone in the world. And Twitter Lite exactly hits on this particular goal. Especially in places like India, we found that our app was just way too slow to access. So we have areas in the world where network infrastructure is more costly, and we could be a lot better in terms of serving those markets and those countries. So it’s way too soon to access the — to assess the usage trends, but our initial results look really positive.”
On that note, it seems Twitter really is not sure if the Twitter Lite app is going to make it in other markets. Western users certainly aren’t hurting in terms of internet connection speed, at least, not in the way that users in countries like the Philippines are.
