Twitter Rolls Out Its Lite Version in 24 More Countries Including Nigeria

Twitter is rolling out the space saving version of its main app Twitter Lite after 2 months of testing in the Philippines.

The Social media platform announced on Friday it’s releasing Twitter Lite to Android’s Google Play store in 24 countries, mostly in emerging markets across Asia, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America.

The app is able to load faster on a slow connection. Twitter says it is “more resilient on unreliable mobile networks,” like 2G and 3G. Twitter additionally reduced the size of the app to under 3MB, so that it doesn’t take up too much space on a phone.

It’ll also allow users to choose which pictures or videos to download in their stream, so they don’t waste data auto-downloading everything.

The full list of countries where Twitter Lite is being made available is Algeria, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Egypt, Israel, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Malaysia, Nigeria, Nepal, Panama, Peru, Serbia, El Salvador, South Africa, Thailand, Tunisia, Tanzania and Venezuela.

Twitter launched the app in the Philippines back in September to conduct some on-the-ground user research, which yielded positive feedback. People appreciated its small size, its ability to use minimal amounts of data and to load quickly in a country not exactly known for blazing fast internet speeds.

“Based on these positive results,” Twitter product manager Jesar Shah said, “we have decided to bring it to more people around the world.”

According to Twitter its experiment in the Philippines has led to a greater than 50% increase in tweets.

The move should help Twitter expand its presence internationally. The company has 330 million monthly active users, 80% of whom are outside the U.S.

Twitter investors closely watch the company’s user growth. After a volatile few years on the stock market, Twitter’s stock has mostly remained constant for the past year. But at $20.58, it’s still less than a third of the high of $69 it achieved in early 2014.

Targeting new Android users in developing markets is a good way of increasing that growth again.