If you’ve never heard of Clubhouse, it’s the latest social media fad that’s taking over the world – in fact, mostly just from Silicon Valley -. It is a very cool experience in live conversations that brings the best of podcasts and social networks like Twitter in a rich experience. The downside? Until now, it was only available on the iPhone. Fortunately, the launch of the Clubhouse for Android is on its way.
The Clubhouse mentioned the Android app in their last blog post in January 2021. This post is basically the company’s big announcement that they are focused on opening the app to “everyone” in 2021. For now, that will only be IOS users, but those on the Google side should see this change soon:
Receiving incredible people 🎉 From the beginning, we wanted to build the Clubhouse for everyone. With that in mind, we are excited to start working on our Android app soon and add more accessibility and location features so that people around the world can experience the Clubhouse in a way that feels native to them.
Obviously, this is not a release date. In fact, it is not even a start date for development. All we know is that until now the Clubhouse was exclusively for iOS and now the company is saying that it will start working on its Android application. This could mean a launch in a few months or years. We just don’t know at this point. We’ll let you know when we know more.
9to5Google’s Take
It is not uncommon for social networks like Clubhouse to delay in their Android releases. In fact, there is a long history of this, from Instagram to Snapchat and Path. The reasons vary. Apparently, companies have decided that the demographics of iOS make more sense to get social media apps, but there are also more tangible reasons. Snapchat was exclusive to iOS for a year because these devices have a more controlled set of camera hardware, which made the user experience more predictable in the early days.
In that case, I bet there is a parallel. As someone who has used the Clubhouse, one of its biggest challenges – even if limited to iOS – is the great disparity in microphone quality. It seems that most people in the Clubhouse, being the first iOS demographic users, use AirPods or something similar. This creates consistency in the audio quality of the conversations. This will probably be more challenging on Android.
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