Social Audio Platform Clubhouse Comes to Android

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After more than a year of being iOS exclusive, social audio platform Clubhouse is finally coming to Android. It is available in beta in the US and allows users to sign up and participate. 

“Our plan over the next few weeks is to collect feedback from the community, fix any issues we see and work to add a few final features like payments and club creation before rolling it out more broadly,” the company said in a blog post.

The company says that the Android version of the audio-only app has been the top request from its building community. The roll-out will first be available to English-speaking markets and to the rest of the world in the upcoming weeks. 

Users outside the United States will be able to pre-register via the Clubhouse page in the Google Play store and be notified once the app is available in their country. 

Despite slowly opening to mainstream media, the Clubhouse will still remain as an invite-only for now, “as part of the effort to keep the growth measured,” the company said in a statement.

Despite the limited access, Clubhouse has gained quite a popularity. Recently, it was reported to have valued $4 billion after a new funding round. 

However, Clubhouse’s fame has also opened a new trend and big tech firms are jumping into the wagon and releasing their own audio-only features. Twitter has launched Spaces, Discord rolled out Stage Channels and Facebook, Spotify, Slack, LinkedIn, and Reddit are also at their own developing stages of adding this type of feature to their services. 

The company acknowledged in its post announcing the Android app that the platform had grown faster than expected. “This had its downsides, as the load stressed our systems—causing widespread server outages and notification failures, and surpassing the limits of our early discovery algorithms,” the post stated. “It made us shift our focus to hiring, fixing, and company building, rather than the community meetups and product features that we normally like to focus on.”