American e-commerce and cloud company Amazon has quietly released a new lite web browser for Android smartphones, called the Internet. In Google Play Store, it has been described as “lighter than the competition”. The app has been designed to consume less space on a device. It comes under 2MB in size and covers up to just 26MB of storage space in a device. The company claims, that the browser offers private user experience by not asking any additional permissions like other browsers to collect data. The browser is available for download via Google Play. It is compatible with smartphones running Android 5.0 Marshmallow and above.
The browser’s private mode (just like Chrome’s incognito mode) is one of its key essential highlights which caught the eye of Android users. There is a trending news section on the homepage. The section refreshes itself every few minutes and brings in new stories. The stories range from sports and current happenings to entertainment. The sports news focus mainly on cricket, which explains Amazon’s effort to reach out to the Indian Android users as its the most popular sport here.
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Also, links to websites like Amazon, Facebook and Twitter are present on the homepage.
It seems that the company has signed a deal with Intex (for pre-installing its browser on Intex phones), and the Intex site is also present on the homepage.
The app comes with a download manager. Its default search engine is Bing. A user can change it to Google from the browser’s settings. As the URL from the Play Store listing suggests, that the browser’s codename is Garuda. Garuda is the god of flight from Hindu mythology.
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In terms of performance, the browser runs fine on devices. It works well on few entry-level phones too. It is for smartphones with low-powered hardware, but it isn’t compatible with Android Go yet, which hopefully changes soon.
The browser has over a hundred installs after going live last month. The company is expected to make a formal announcement soon.
Similar Move By Amazon Earlier
Earlier Amazon had taken the same strategy with the Kindle Lite app. It was available on the Play Store for quite some time, before being officially announced. The lite version offered basic e-book reading experience under 2MB and worked on slower data speeds and in locations with unstable data connectivity.
Other companies like Facebook and Google have made similar efforts towards lightweight mobile applications for emerging markets like India. These companies are heavily working on the “lite” version applications. Facebook has introduced Facebook Lite and Messenger Lite to extend its social networking platform to inferior and entry-level smartphones with limited data access. Google has also introduced Gmail Go, Google Maps Go, YouTube Go and Google Go. Google’s “lite” apps are already pre-installed on smartphones running Android Go smartphones.
