The regular Shazam app is becoming more and more of a social network centered around music than the music discovery engine it once was. It weighs over 27MB, tries to load recommendations and popular tracks each time you open it, and has charts and Auto Shazam, and plenty of features that you may not need or want especially when you're on a slow network or have limited bandwidth. That's why Shazam Lite was created.

It goes to the heart of Shazam: music recognition. At less than 1MB, it only has the essentials and strips away all the unnecessary bloat, so that you can install it even on devices with low storage. Better yet, it's optimized for 2G networks and slow connections, and it uses little data to get its results. It can even work offline, keeping one or many songs in the queue until you have an internet connection and can get the results.

I personally applaud this trend of tailoring apps for emerging markets and areas with poor connections. Not all of us have super fast mobile or WiFi connections, or unlimited usage. And all apps have started taking that for granted lately, becoming bloated with features and using more and more data for superfluous options. While I would prefer devs improve their existing apps instead of releasing separate ones, I do understand the rationale behind it being easier to start from scratch and I don't mind it as long as we're getting data-conscious apps in every sense of the word.

Shazam Lite will be rolling out today in India, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Nigeria in English language, and in Spanish in Venezuela. It's free and compatible with devices running Android 2.3 and above. You can grab it from the Play Store below if your country is on that list. If not, we'll try to have the APK for you soon.