Spotify is reputed as one of the most cherished apps for enjoying music due to its strong recommendation system, synchronized playback as well as remote control features across multiple devices, and an engaging UI. It has 200 million users in 79 countries across the world and users in a lot of these markets (including India) suffer from poor connectivity, the lack of affordable data plans, budget or older smartphones. To prevent any of these factors from hindering the music streaming experience of users, Spotify has announced a Lite version, which is less than 10MB in size and comes with special data-saving features.
Although the welcome screen of the Spotify Lite looks identical to the original app, the Lite version has a hoard of features meant to reduce your data consumption as well as deal with the problems of limited storage. First off, there's an option to change the sound quality from main player UI and this feature informs you about the approximate consumption of data per song. You can also set your preference for the sound quality in the Settings.
Additionally, there's an option to set the monthly limit for the consumption of mobile data. Currently, there's no option to change the starting and end date for the counter so that you can sync it with your monthly prepaid recharge cycle. The available option should, however, allow you to keep a tab on the consumption if you check actively. Alternatively, it will notify you for each calendar month. There's another option in the Settings and it allows you to manage your smartphone's storage, clear the cache, and delete all the downloads if need be.
Notably, Spotify Lite has fewer features than the full app and some of the missing ones include Song Radio as well as the newly introduced Sleep Timer. The icons in the app are simpler compared to the main Spotify app for Android and the option to share tracks is only available in a few tracks. While you can shuffle tracks from a particular artist or within a playlist, there's no option to shuffle tracks from the player window. Furthermore, the Spotify Connect feature is not readily available but you should be able to control the playback on other devices with the Lite app.
In terms of performance, however, the absence of the options above did not hamper my listening experience. I tried this out on the Nokia 2.2 and experienced no hiccups, whatsoever. The app feels very well optimized. I do hope the shuffle and the Radio options are be added in the app but it is currently in beta so we can hope for these and more changes coming in the future. Whether you have a low-powered smartphone or not, you can download and try the Spotify Lite app and compare it with the main app.
The app is currently available in 36 countries throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. The entire list of countries includes Algeria, Argentina, Bahrain, Brazil, Bolivia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Nicaragua, Oman, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Uruguay, and Vietnam.
Source: Spotify