Over-complicated, storage-filling apps can slow us down. Instragram Lite is the latest brand to shed unwanted features and help us work better

Instagram has become the latest app to get the so-called lite treatment – a stripped-back, cut-down reaction to the increasingly over-complicated, bloat-filled apps we’re being asked to swallow on a daily basis from the big app developers.



The new Instagram Lite comes in under 1MB, making it just a fraction of the full-fat Instagram’s 84MB. The only things you can’t do with the lite version of the app are to post videos or send direct messages. Applying filters, posting photos and viewing stories are all included.

We’ve never had so many apps from the big brands. Facebook has more than 20, and that’s before you include those from Facebook’s other products, such as the six from Instagram, three from WhatsApp, one from Oculus, another from Onavo, the tbh Q&A app ... the list goes on.

It isn’t just the sheer quantity of apps that is threatening to drown our poor smartphones either. Most of them have ballooned in size becoming bloated messes, filled with feature after feature that you probably don’t use, and taking up far too much space and clogging up your phone in the process.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ever played a game in Messenger, or tapped on Facebook’s chatbot store Discover? Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian

Take the ever expanding Facebook Messenger app you’re forced to install alongside the main Facebook app if you want to chat on your phone. Look at the bottom navigation bar – have you ever tapped on Discover? Or Games? Or have been pleased by an interruption in one of your chats from Facebook’s AI bot M? Have you ever created a “story” or even viewed someone else’s in Messenger? If not, all the code supporting these whiz-bang features is dead weight, bogging down your phone for no reason.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. The new push towards lite apps can help – stripped-down versions of your favourite apps that bring the experience back to what made you download it in the first place. Gone are the needless features and with them so too are the countless megabytes of precious storage space they took up. As a consequence they launch way faster and often simply work better.

Many of these lite apps are designed by the likes of Facebook and Google to be smaller, cheaper to download and to use less data to entice those in the developing world. But they work just fine in the UK, US or any other nation, once you have them installed.

The Facebook Messenger Lite app is a prime example. It comes in at under 10MB to download and takes up under 34MB when up and running, which is more than 150MB less than the full-fat version of Facebook Messenger. It still sends chats, and can even do video calls.

Facebook Lite is equally small, coming in at under 10MB, where the full Facebook app can take up more than 500MB in storage.

Other favourites include Twitter Lite, Skype Lite and Google’s collection of Go apps, which are similar cut down versions of Google Maps, YouTube and the company’s other services. There’s even a 5MB version of Uber, but it’s only available in India.

Some of these lite apps aren’t available in the UK and US or for the iPhone, but they should be. It’s time we stopped blaming our phones for being slow and turned our ire on the bloated apps we’re being asked to use instead.

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