Twitter announced on Monday that Twitter Lite is now available in Kenya in the Google Play store.
The social media platform cited slow mobile networks, expensive data plans and lack of space on mobile devices as their reason for coming up with Twitter Lite.
“When building new products, we want to make sure what we create allows people to have the best possible experience, no matter where they are,” said Product Manager Jesar Shah.
She said the app minimises data usage, loads quickly on slower networks and takes up less space on electric devices.
Shah said it will ease accessibility to people with data, bandwidth and device constraints adding it will help consumers save money and data in real time.
“By enabling data saver, you can control the images and videos load on your phone,” she said.
“You can still load all this content at any time by hitting “Load image” or “Load video”, helping you save money and data in real time,” Shah said.
The new social media platform is built for 2G and 3G networks.
Shah said while using the app on 2G or 3G, content will load quickly even on unreliable networks.
The Bookmarks feature on Twitter Lite allows a user to save important tweets for later use, when more data or a better internet connection is available.
Push notifications, night mode and threaded tweets are also available on the app.
“We’ve made it easy to create a thread by adding a plus button in the composer, so you can connect your thoughts and publish your threaded tweets all at the same time,” Shah said.
Twitter Lite was released last year in the Google Play Store.
Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Nigeria, Uganda, Lebanon, Morocco and Zimbabwe are the only African countries that have access to it.
