NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Tuesday, August 20, 2019

By Abigail Ng

Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter and even LinkedIn have pushed out “lite” versions — smaller and simpler iterations of their platforms — and that has everything to do with emerging markets, analysts say.

Last month, Spotify Lite officially launched in 36 markets, while Tinder has announced plans to launch its own “lite” app.

With around 6.5 billion people living in developing economies, there’s a lot of potential for technology firms to tap on — but they need to take a different approach because of technological limitations in those markets, according to analysts.

Users in the developing world typically use basic mobile phones, instead of larger or more advanced devices, but that poses a problem amid increasingly advanced apps. Aside from taking up space in devices, full versions of apps have many features that take time to load, while others gobble up large amounts of mobile data.

Photo courtesy of Ismael Ferdous.