To be more economic, app based social networks (and clients) are now releasing “tiny” versions of their mobile apps. We have the Facebook Lite, Messenger Lite, PinHog for Pinterest and a bunch of other apps. Twitter may join the family as they reportedly testing a “Lite” version for their Android app in Philippines.
“Philippines represents a good place to test such a product, because it has slow mobile networks and expensive data plans, while mobile devices with limited storage are still very popular there.”, stated the social media giant. A little something I believe, as Africans, we can perfectly relate to.
The app appears to be under 1MB which won’t induce much strain on our batteries. You should also know that this app is more of an experiment and might not hit app stores any time soon or atall. Twitter might be simply trying to detect features in the standard app that drains our data. Not like we don’t know them already.
Speaking of features though, the Lite version still has familiar features and the interface hasn’t drastically changed. You have the option to turn off data-heavy images and videos. The app reportedly opens 30% faster then the standard app and can save up to 70% of data.
Should Twitter officially launch this app, there’s a good chance it would be available to us. I’m not saying I’m happy our internet problems over here has made companies “pity” us. Sad but true, we still need apps that don’t strain our internet plans and are mild on storage.
The app basically reeks of convenience which is what we really need right now. Besides the app appealing to a lot of users, it may increase the time people spend on Twitter; allowing users to stay up-to-date on what’s happening. Which is what Twitter is all about.
That said, Twitter just jumbo-sized their character limit. Okay, maybe “jumbo-sized” is a bit of an exaggeration but if you’re like me, you definitely know the struggle of editing your Tweet over and over again just to get within the 140 character limit. But now, you can tweet up to 280 characters!
The extension is however not extended to certain Asian languages like Chinese and Japanese. The exclusion is because these users can fit more thoughts into less characters. All thanks to the nature of their language. Although, Twitter says the expansion might be expanded to them too.
This is a big change for Twitter and it’s users. Twitter thrives on brevity and speed, allowing users to share thoughts quickly. However the previous character limit was a bit inconvenient for a number of users. It will be interesting to see how we take advantage of this.
Finally, although this is a speculation, Twitter might introduce a feature that allows users to easily post threads at once. Normally, a user has to comment on a previous tweet after it has been posted to start a thread. But now, he/she can create a thread and tweet it all at once.
Twitter as a company has being struggling for years to grow it users for years with 328 million month users compared to social giants, Facebook’s 2 billion users, Tumblr’s 600 million, etc. With the new changes they’ve been rolling out, they would like to see more people around Africa sign up.