Twitter's Vine Comes to Android

Woohoo, Android users can join the “cool kids club” as Twitter’s Vine app has finally come to Google’s operating system.

Vine, the popular app that allows people to take short videos and post them to Twitter through their smartphones, has only been available to iPhone users since Twitter launched it in January this year. Since its launch, Vine has attracted over 13 million users, according to Twitter, although it did not make it clear whether these are monthly active users or all registered users. And if these figures were not high enough already, now that Vine has reached the Android market, these numbers are expected to grow exponentially.

“Vine for Android has many of the features that more than 13 million people have already grown to love including: easy video creation with automatic playback and sound; Explore, where you can discover popular posts and see what’s trending; and Find Friends, where you can find and invite people you know to join. I’ve no doubt that the app’s popularity will explode,” says Sara Haider, Android engineer.

Vine for Android is slightly different than it is for the iPhone and has some features missing. These include support for smartphones’ front-facing cameras, hashtags, search and sharing to Facebook. According to Twitter, it is working to make the two flavors have the same capabilities in upcoming updates.

“Though we’ve been very focused on releasing Vine for Android, we’ve continued to release updates and add new features to the iOS app. As a result, the two apps are not perfectly in sync, but that won’t be the case for long,” notes Haider.

Vine is only available to users on Android devices running version 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich or higher.