Music identification app Shazam’s new Lite version saves your phone some space

By Lulu Chang Published October 6, 2016

Your phone’s real estate is precious.

With all the photos, music, and apps your stored on your mobile device, space can get pretty tight. But now, Shazam is helping you free some of it up. On Thursday, the music identification app released a new, much lighter version of its software, following in the footsteps of other popular applications like Facebook’s Messenger Lite — it’s creatively named Shazam Lite, and it weighs in at just 1MB, a far cry from the 27MB of the full-sized app.

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Even though it’s the slimmer version of the original, Shazam Lite is not giving anything up in terms of functionality. The app still listens to songs you don’t know and identifies them for you, but because it does away with all that extra stuff, you can install it on your phone even if you’re running super low on storage, or you’re in an area with slower connections. And because it also uses less data to bring you results, you might even save some money, too.

Better still, Shazam Lite has the capacity to work offline. That means that even if you’re in a dead zone, you can still have the app record that tune, then figure out its name and artist once you’re back in Wi-Fi or service range.

So what doesn’t it have? For one, you won’t be able to see lyrics, nor will you be able to check out user profiles. You can’t set it to automatically ID songs either, but these hardly seem like necessary features.

Currently, you can download the app for free on Android in India, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Nigeria, and Venezuela, if you have an Android device running version 2.3 and later. So go ahead, friends. Let that app take up 1MB of space on your phone. You barely even have to consider it a splurge.

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Fascinated by the effects of technology on human interaction, Lulu believes that if her parents can use your new app…

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