Instagram Lite was launched in June 2018 in some parts of the world. Back in May, it was shut down but it came back in September 2020. Now, the company has launched its Lite variant in India. It comes as good news for those of us who haven’t gotten used to the new home tab layout and want the old one to come back. Moreover, Instagram Lite doesn’t have the Shop and Reels buttons in the navigation bar.

The new app is less than 2MB in size. It has been created to bring the core Instagram experience to people who are unfamiliar with the app. As per Instagram, it conducted a research in India earlier this year to ascertain the attractiveness and comprehension of new products. It observed that there was a common barrier of ‘compromised internet experience’ because of low memory phones and heavy apps. India is primarily a test country for Instagram Lite. The app is only available on the Google Play Store for now.

I downloaded the app, and while the core experience is similar to the main Instagram app, several new features are missing. For instance, there is no support for Reels, Instagram’s answer to TikTok. Plus, there is no Shop or IGTV. Moreover, the navigation bar has the old layout with the search tab at the bottom, which was recently replaced by the Reels tab. Essentially, Instagram Lite is the old version of Instagram. Additionally, it doesn’t support some stickers like the ‘Ask me Anything’ one.

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Instagram Lite will be available in Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu. The company has also announced the second version of ‘Born on Instagram’ which is aimed at providing collaboration and mentorship opportunities to content creators. The new developments were announced a the two-day Facebook Fuel for India event.