Opera is today officially announcing the availability of Opera News Lite, “a smaller version of the popular Opera News application, designed for devices with limited data storage capabilities”
The new app has been available for download by users through the Google Play Store over the last few days and already has over 100,000 downloads on the platform and is already one of the top free apps.
At just 1 megabyte in size, Opera News Lite will be a good fit for all the Android smartphones with 8 gigabytes of onboard storage or less (hello, Neon Kicka users) and anyone concerned about running out of space on their device.
Besides being space-conscious, Opera notes that it will also work regardless of one’s geographic location or network connectivity conditions, hinting at the app being optimized for slow and intermittent data connections.
“For Opera News Lite users who live in Kenya, Nigeria, or nearby countries, you will be able to browse four times faster on the app thanks to the recent installation of our local data centres in the cities of Lagos and Mombasa,” says a statement from the company.
2 years ago, Opera debuted Opera News to expand the scope of the news it was offering users of its popular mobile browsers – Opera Mobile and Opera mini.
Opera News Lite offers the same features that the standard Opera News app offers so old users can expect the same personalized articles, notifications on breaking news (important during these dark days but can also be very annoying as Opera News is known to be spammy) and what Opera is calling “exclusive original content”.
The latter – “exclusive original content” – is from content creators like yours truly who opt to sign up for Opera’s new editorial platform, Opera News Hub, which is available and open to content creators in Kenya starting today.
Opera is promising content creators who sign up to the Opera News Hub platform a reach of over 350 million people, the number of people that access the company’s products around the world.
