LinkedIn’s bite-sized application, LinkedIn Lite, is now available for download by users in Kenya.
The application, which was officially unveiled in India, its launch market, only 2 weeks ago, had been under testing in the same country since late last year.
LinkedIn Lite aims to provide the LinkedIn experience to users in emerging markets where factors like storage space on smartphones, lack of widespread network coverage, costly internet subscription options among others bedevil the users.
By doing so, LinkedIn is joining Facebook, Google and even Twitter that have provided “lite” or mobile data-friendly versions of the various services they have to offer users in these countries.
Kenya is not alone, though. It is one of 60 countries that are receiving LinkedIn Lite in early August. In Africa, it is one of 18 countries where users are now able to download LinkedIn Lite from the Google Play Store. LinkedIn users in 6 other African countries, Congo, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Lesotho, Mauritania and Swaziland, will however have to make do with a progressive web app instead of the full native application.
The application is under 1 megabyte in size (just 603KB) and you can hardly tell it apart from its full-fledged counterpart. It has all the features that one will need. Notifications, job alerts (so that users don’t have to install the standalone Jobs app), the usual feed and full access to one’s network. It also loads very fast. How crazy is that?
There is only one omission, though, support for the fast-loading Google-powered Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), which is there on the full LinkedIn app, has been dropped in the lite app. This is not so strange, though. Facebook does a similar thing in its lite app where fast-loading Instant Articles are not supported and users clicking through are instead redirected to a web view that serves the entire unformatted article/post.
