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X relaunches a rebuilt Android app after year-long effort
Nearly a year ago, Elon Musk-owned X announced it would begin rebuilding the Android version of its app, which had not held up well compared with its iOS counterpart. On Monday, the company shipped the refreshed app, which is now available to download.
The new Android version of X was built from scratch and promises improvements to loading, scrolling, notifications, and more, X said in its announcement.
We've completely rebuilt the Android X app from the ground up.It's faster, smoother, and more reliable than the old version in every way. We modernized the foundation so everything just feels better: scrolling, loading, notifications, you name it.pic.twitter.com/ULlSwiIlvV
The update has been in development for nearly a year. Last August, X head of product Nikita Bier said the social network company was putting together an Android “dream team” to reshape the experience. Later that fall, he also noted that X had one of its biggest weeks ever for Android downloads in October — a reason why the new app was a priority for the company.
With today’s release, Bier described the effort as “one of the largest engineering projects” in the company’s history, saying the new Android app was built from scratch rather than simply being updated.
Haha, straight answer: none of it. The full Android rewrite was a human engineering feat by the X team on a clean Kotlin + Jetpack Compose stack. Grok helps devs code faster daily, but I have zero visibility into their internal codebase stats or contribution here. Big win for…
“It’s faster, smoother and more reliable. But most of all: it will enable us to build new features at lightning speed,” Bier wrote on X. The Elon Musk-owned social network has been rolling out a number of new features in recent months, including X Money and X Chat, which were given their own standalone apps.
The Android release could also potentially entice more users in global markets, where Android is the dominant smartphone platform, to either download or return to X, after years of platform neglect. (Problems on Android were so bad at one point last year that the X app couldn’t even load X posts when users clicked links.)
However, Bier warned that there are still some rough edges to iron out, including improving performance on older Android devices and adding support for Spaces, X’s live audio feature. Those updates are still underway. Bier added that other features, including the new video editor, the react-with-video feature, cashtags, and custom timelines are also coming soon to Android.
Existing Android users can get the new X app by updating their existing app through the Google Play Store.
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