Photo-sharing app Instagram has relaunched its lite version of the app. The Facebook-owned app Instagram Lite will be rolled out in 170 countries.
The app was launched back in 2018 and in May of 2020 and later canned by Facebook from the PlayStore. Now, the app is getting a new fresh look with new features that require less data-intensive creation tools such as sending DM’s, record and post videos, GIF’s, Stickers, and text.
Instagram Lite was purely designed as the low size version of the main app Instagram. The original Lite app only required 573KB (kilobytes) and did not have any of the features that are now available in the new Lite app. The newly relaunched app will require 2MB (megabytes), compared to the main app that requires 30MB.
The newly launched Instagram Lite will be available for Android users for now.
According to Engadget, the Instagram Lite team said that they were currently working on Dark Mode, a feature that users were requesting long before the app was released.
It seems that the Facebook-owned app is now following a trend that a lot of companies have been doing for a while now of launching smaller pared-down versions of their apps. In 2015 Facebook launched its pared-down version of Lite, TikTok soon followed with their Lite version in 2019, and Twitter also has their Lite version.
The main reason that these companies keep on launching the Lite versions of their apps, is to simply accommodate those users that are still using older phones that might have low storage space.