What is TikTok Lite and How Is It Different From TikTok?

The launch of TikTok Lite in 2018 promised customers a low-bandwidth version of the original app, and it was targeted at users based in regions around the world plagued by inferior internet services and slower connectivity speeds, as well as those who have minimal storage space on their mobile devices. 

The objective behind the launch of the lite version of the flagship app was to increase accessibility despite regional constraints, as well as to remove barriers to entry that were preventing many consumers from being able to use TikTok effectively and efficiently. 

However, despite the seemingly good intentions behind the move to make the app available to a larger audience, TikTok Lite has received significant criticism. This negative feedback focused on two major areas of concern: first, its rewards programme that provided financial incentivisation for users to engage with content; and second, its lack of safety precautions and basic user protections. 

We’re going to dive right into the differences between TikTok and TikTok Lite before getting into why the spinoff app has raised serious concerns among researchers, social media experts and users. 

TikTok Vs. TikTok Lite: What’s the Difference?

The purpose behind creating TikTok Lite was to allow more consumers to be able to enjoy the app’s services regardless of internet quality and phone storage capacity, but how did they make that possible? 

Here are some of the differences between the two apps that helped them achieve this goal:

Storage Space

The original app uses 182MB data which can increase to nearly 2GB when you take into account app and cache data.

TikTok Lite, on the other hand, takes up far less space with the figures sitting closer to 30MB and 125MB respectively.

Features

TikTok Lite offers users most of the same features of the main app barring one noticeable difference – users are not able to upload content. However, this is reportedly going to be an added feature in the future, so this difference may not exist for very long.

Another difference between the apps’ features is the sharing function. While the ordinary version of TikTok allows users to share content in a plethora of ways – including react, repost, respond with gifs, copy links, share to socials and more – the Lite version limits sharing to reporting suspicious or offensive behaviour or directly sharing links.

Interface

Both apps enjoy the same interface, with virtually no difference in appearance. However, what users are likely to notice is that videos will probably lag far more often on TikTok Lite. This is due to the fact that, unlike the original app, it doesn’t save data which results in delays. 

Settings 

Like most other modern apps, TikTok has a variety of different safety and privacy settings to choose from, however, while TikTok Lite does include privacy settings too, they’re significantly more limited. In fact, they pretty much offer three main settings: the choice betwee either a public or private account, whether or not you want your contacts to be able to find you and access to a list of other users you have blocked. 

These basic privacy settings are supposedly a result of the fact that the app isn’t able to save data. 

Why Are People Concerned About TikTok Lite?

The first major red flag raised about TikTok Lite pertained to its rewards system that was launched, and subsequently suspended earlier this year. However, since then, social media experts have identified several additional more damning problems with TikTok Lite.

TikTok Lite Rewards

TikTok Lite launched a rewards programme that incentivised users to like videos, follow creators and save videos by promising them the potential to earn points – these points could then be used to make in-app purchases or buy Amazon vouchers. 

Unsurprisingly, this raised a lot of concern over the ethics of this tactic, as well as the potential impact it may have on the mental health of users involved. As a result, the EU Commission swiftly stepped in to express these concerns, which led to TikTok Lite suspending the programme. 

Since its suspension in April of 2024, TikTok Lite Rewards has ceased to exist.

Missing Safety Features on TikTok Lite

The more pressing issue, in the opinion of many social media experts, users and parents, is the blatant reduction in safety precautions that are present on the original app. This includes:

• Labelling Dangerous Activities: Over the years, social media has seen many “challenges” and trends go viral, and plenty of them have had the potential to be dangerous. That’s why TikTok and other mainstream platforms label activities that are considered dangerous to serve as a warning for users. However, TikTok Lite does not label dangerous activities.

• Opt-In Option for Graphic Content: Most social media platforms protect users from seeing sensitive and graphic content by blocking it and providing a warning before allowing users to opt in if they’d like to proceed. TikTok Lite does not display the opt-in screen.

• Flagging Misinformation: Due to the dramatic increase in the spread of misinformation via the internet in recent years, especially relating to politics and economic issues, it’s become common practice for apps to flag possible misinformation and sometimes even provide additional information on the relevant topic. However, users and experts claim that these flags are inadequately implemented on TikTok Lite.

• Reduced User Control: The original version of TikTok allows users to control the kind of content that they’re exposed to by doing things like “filtering malicious comments” or blocking certain types of videos. TikTok Lite, however, doesn’t give users the ability to do this. 

• Labelling AI-Generated Content: The proliferation of AI-generated content in recent years has created a need to be able to differentiate between AI content and human-generated content, which is why many apps require AI-generated content to be labelled as such. For some reason, however, TikTok Lite doesn’t have the same requirement.

While the changes made in the development of TikTok Lite were chalked down to the app’s limited storage capacity and processing power (due to the use of inferior internet connections), many experts have asserted that this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. 

In fact, particularly with regard to the missing safety features, may have claimed that there’s no technical reason for designers not to implement content labels and improved controls for users.

Thus, the growing feeling in the world of social media is that without changes made to these issues, TikTok Lite will not be a safe and secure application for consumers. The hope is that the social media giant will heed these warnings and take these recommendations to heart in order to allow TikTok Lite to function in the way that creators say it was intended.