Some of you might have heard of Android Go, a specific Android platform that's targeted towards low-cost devices that have limited memory. Which would be a pretty swell thing to have, especially if you've bought that low-cost Prepaid Android from ColesWorth and found it running terribly because of all the inbuilt bloatware that the vendor has kindly preinstalled.
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Android Go takes the features of Android O, and tries to make these work as best they can on a lower-end device. As well as optimization, the new software will focus on rebuilding Google’s core apps - such as Gmail and Google Chrome - to ensure they use less storage space, processing power and mobile data.
Android Go will also highlight apps that use less data, storage and memory on the top of the Google Play Store. A section that says “optimized for your device” will show you lighter versions of the apps you love, such as Skype and Facebook.
Continuing on the 'slimming' down bandwagon, Google in February launched a beta of Youtube Go - an app that only weighs 8.5 megabytes in size, and tailored specifically for video sharing and offline viewing. Specifically, it lets you download YT videos onto your device's local storage — a feature that you normally have to pay money for (Youtube RED), although the strict limitation is that you can only download 480p resolution videos, and to be able to install this app, you'd have to be located in a specified country (India for e.g).
And as of today, Google has released a new Google Search Lite app which ..
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aims to make things faster and more data-friendly for some markets by working on slow connections, supporting offline features, using less data and thus taking much less time to finish tasks.
This is obviously useful for less-developed countries with patchy wifi networks or countries with expensive mobile broadband (cough, Australia). However, some redditors feel that it's not right that Google limits the use of these apps to certain countries since it's just not 3rd world countries that have slow, unreliable or expensive internet access. If you want access to these apps though, you can still sideload them.
Thanks for the update.
I wish they did this 5 years ago. They made Android 2.3.4 devices practically unusable the day they made Google Play Services over 160 MB - leaving enough space for a handful of apps on unrooted budget devices. Then they modernised Google Maps a few years ago and made it extremely slow on older PCs and unstable on many Android 4.x devices.
And I've said it before and I'll say it again. It seems that these days in poor East Asian countries you either have no smartphone or a $200+ one (of course I have seen exceptions but that makes the statement less interesting).