Microsoft announces Made for India Skype Lite for Android users

Microsoft today during the company's 'Future Decoded' technology conference announced Skype Lite, a new low-data version of the original app exclusively designed for the Indian market.

Skype Lite is designed with new and integrated features such as support for SMS, native phone contacts and calls, data usage tracking and India focused Skype bots to help users be more productive even in challenging network conditions.

Skype will also bring Aadhar integration to the app by June 2017 tht will allow users to authenticate the identity of unknown callers whenever required.

The new app provides audio, video and instant messaging services at lower bandwidths on slower networks such as 2G and 3G on Android smartphones.

Microsoft says that the new app is built from the ground up at company's Hyderabad center and comes powered by Microsoft cloud services. Skype Lite would be light on bandwidth and memory usage to allow users to send messages, make video and voice calls even on a 2G network.

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The company has also taken care of the fact that lower range Android smartphones come with limited storage and users often face trouble while downloading apps that are bigger in size. That said, Skype Lite will occupy just 13MB of storage space on the mobile devices.

Skype Lite offers a number of new features in addition to what the original Skype app has to offer to users. The new app allows users to track their data usage with the built-in data manager.

Users can set Skype Lite as default messaging app that can segregate the type of messages (promotional texts, OTPs, etc.) and integrates a number of bots. Besides, Microsoft has also added a dark theme to make it easy for users to use the app during night time.

The application also intelligently compress the multimedia files that users share with their contact list by figuring out if they are connected to Wi-Fi or using the app on cellular data.

The new Skype Lite supports seven Indian languages including Gujarati, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.

With the new app, the Redmond giant is trying to solve the very problem of lower bandwidth networks that restricts mobile users to use text, video and voice-based services.

Skype Lite also feature bots to enhance productivity. Users can install bots from a variety of categories including news, sports, lifestyle, etc. The application is available on Google Play store for Android users.