It seems like Lite apps are making a name for themselves in the Android catalog, with more and more big names joining the club. After the recent announcement of Instagram Lite, now Spotify has released its own slimmed-down version. Spotify Lite is here to offer all the best music on our smartphone, although the final result isn’t quite as good as we would have hoped.

It wouldn’t be fair to talk about Spotify Lite without making it clear that this app is still under development. This is obvious if we just read the official description that indicates “Spotify Lite is a test.” It may not seem like it, due to its fluidity and how well it works, but soon you’ll discover its first big problem: the albums and the playlists can only be listened to in shuffle mode. It doesn’t matter if you have a Premium account or not, everything is shuffled. 

As usual in this type of app, Spotify Lite offers fewer features than usual. The app is divided into three tabs (Home, Search, and Favorites) and, although you can access tons of playlists, you can’t search for users that that allow access to their profiles. This is an obstacle when it comes to listening to either your own or other people’s playlists, because you have to search individually until you find the one you want to listen to. You can’t search for songs individually either — the app basically revolves around not giving users much control over what they’re listening to. 

Even knowing that we’re talking about an app that’s still in early development, the lack of basic options makes it hard to enjoy. Obviously, there are good things, like its reduced size (15 MB instead of over 100 MB with the traditional version) and the screen that lets you keep track of mobile data used and the space Spotify Lite takes up on your device. But the the experience in general is not nearly as good as with the original app.

If you don’t mind listening to your music in shuffle mode and you want to save mobile data, Spotify Lite is a good alternative to keep in mind when you have a limited Internet connection. However, if you’re a Premium user, we don’t recommend using it -at least for now- considering you can’t even download songs to listen to them offline. Nonetheless, it’s always a good thing when apps like this come out, even if this one doesn’t live up to our expectations. We’ll make sure we keep an eye on Spotify Lite to see what becomes of it in the future.

Spotify Lite for Android on Uptodown [APK] | Download