Twitter introduces Twitter Lite in India with Vodafone as launch partner

Twitter has launched its global Twitter Lite product from India, reinforcing its commitment to the country as a strategic mobile and social media market worldwide. Twitter Lite is a new mobile web experience accessible to anyone with a smartphone or tablet with a browser, optimized for speed with up to 30% faster launch times, reduces data usage up to 70% with data saver mode turned on, and takes up less than 1MB on mobile devices. Of course, Twitter Lite still provides the key features of Twitter as well as app-like performance such as a wide range of push notifications and offline support.

As the first global launch partner for Twitter Lite, Vodafone is providing a customised timeline of top cricket-related Tweets available via Twitter Lite to the telco’s smartphone customers throughout the T20 season. Now any Indian sports fan on Vodafone’s network of 200 million subscribers across the country can use Twitter Lite to get real-time updates from their favourite cricket league, teams, players, matches or commentators, just in time as the T20 cricket season kicks off.

Twitter Lite is now globally available via mobile.twitter.com and makes Twitter more accessible to millions of people - all one needs is a smartphone or tablet with a browser, no App Store or Google Play account required. It supports 42 languages including six Indic languages: Hindi, Bengali, Kannada, Tamil, Gujarati, and Marathi. For more info about Twitter Lite, you can visit lite.twitter.com.

Maya Hari, Managing Director, Twitter Asia Pacific, said, “India today is already one of Twitter’s largest and fastest growing audience markets worldwide and we’ve seen significant usage around key moments in Indian society such as the recent State Elections, Union Budget, and the Jio FilmFare Awards. We’ve taken feedback from our Indian users to make Twitter Lite a faster, more affordable way to use Twitter all over the country, especially for people that have slow mobile connections and expensive data plans. With Twitter Lite, we’re excited to give our existing Indian users a better overall Twitter experience, as well as reach many more Indians outside of the main metros who can now try Twitter as their best way to see what’s happening in the world right now.”

Arvinder Gujral, Senior Director, Business Development, Twitter Asia Pacific, said, “Cricket is one of the most talked about topics in India, and the volume and diversity of conversations with fans, players, commentators and teams is reflected on Twitter. For example, there were over 10.6 million Tweets about the Indian Premier League (IPL) during last year’s T20 season. Through the partnership with Vodafone, we are increasing the accessibility and visibility of Twitter Lite on one of the largest mobile networks in the world. We’re excited to have Vodafone, a brand that shares our passion for cricket, on board to help us reach millions of Indians and unite the nation in the spirit of cricket. This is an innovative example of how we can partner with companies all over the world to make Twitter Lite more useful in people’s daily lives.”

Avneesh Khosla, Executive Vice President, Products & Services, Vodafone India said, “We are happy to partner with Twitter to offer this innovative service to our customers. It will enable our customers to access a selection of curated Twitter content in their areas of interest - first with cricket and more to come across other genres. Throughout the 10th season of IPL, our customers can look forward to enjoying some great content using Twitter Lite on Vodafone SuperNetTM.”

Here’s how Twitter Lite works for the Vodafone customised cricket timeline experience:

Vodafone subscribers may receive an SMS alert with a link to the special curated timeline on Twitter Lite where you can get live updates on the T20 cricket season.

You can also choose to enable the data saver mode on Twitter Lite to reduce data usage and enjoy real-time cricket content in an affordable manner at any time. In this mode, fans will see a preview of images and videos before choosing which ones to fully load.

In addition, on the Android platform, there’s no fear of missing out as you can choose to be alerted via push notifications to what’s happening in your Twitter network or what people are talking about during the T20 season.

Even when you temporarily lose connectivity, Twitter Lite will offer offline support, so you will never be interrupted while reviewing the latest cricket match updates in the specially curated Twitter timeline.

To easily access the special cricket timeline on Twitter Lite throughout the T20 season, follow the prompt to add Twitter Lite to your phone’s home screen to quickly launch the app with just one tap. For those who have the native app already installed with faster devices and connection speeds, you can easily move from the web experience to the native app.

Beyond the specially curated Twitter timeline from the Vodafone partnership, sports fans can use Twitter Lite to get score updates, access to experts, match interviews and more cricket-related info on Twitter from content partners such as Cricbuzz and ESPNcricInfo throughout the T20 season.