Shazam released a stripped down version of their music discovery app that takes up less storage and uses less data and they are calling it Shazam Lite. It’s obviously directed towards the emerging markets who don’t have reliable network coverage, who will be able to identify tunes even while offline.
Announced on their blog, the most popular music discovery app has been shrunken down to its core functionality of identifying tracks while offline and even save the search results in case you want to revisit them. The app is under 1MB to install so it hardly takes up any space in your phone and uses way less data. It’s supported on devices running on Android 2.3 and higher so it has maximum compatibility. Keeping in mind the kind of users they are targeting, the app will be using very low memory and still try to churn out results in the worst network conditions possible.
Facebook also took the approach of launching lighter versions of their apps such as Facebook Lite and Messenger Lite. This step is again focused towards emerging markets where old and low-powered smartphones are in abundance. Along with them, the network connectivity isn’t great as well, hence the issue of being able to perform basic functions is really important for these light versions of apps.
Shazam Lite will be available for selected countries where it’s actually needed such as India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Philippines and Nigeria in the English language. They are also releasing the app in Venezuela in the Spanish language. Their focus is completely on emerging markets, and since such a market doesn’t really use an iPhone, they probably won’t be releasing an iOS version of the app. Shazam Lite is already available in India and it can downloaded from the Play Store.