https://thenextweb.com/apps/2019/11/22/how-facebook-crammed-all-its-major-features-into-a-2mb-lite-app/

Over the past few years, several major mature tech companies including the likes of Google, Uber, Spotify, and Twitter have been courting the ‘next billion users’ – people who are getting online for the first time ever with mobile devices, instead of desktops. Winning over this new audience requires optimizing services and software optimized for conditions prevalent in developing markets, like spotty connectivity, slow internet speeds, and wide proliferation of low-end mobile devices.

Companies started to design a ‘lite’ version of their apps that can run on most phones and don’t take up much space on the device (less than 10MB). The primary reason was that many folks used to uninstall apps to make room for some photos, videos, or music. These apps were also designed to use the minimum amount of data, and even work when network conditions were not ideal. As a result, these companies came up with lite apps that were much smaller and snippier than their main counterparts.