Last week we saw Clubhouse finally taking the plunge into Android. The blogpost from Clubhouse themselves, dated 9th May 2021 said that they will be pushing into the Android market with a Beta app starting with their home market, the United States of America. Apart from their home market though, they said they will be pushing into other English-speaking markets in the coming weeks.
We thought that we will only get Clubhouse in two to four weeks. To be fair, while Malaysia is considered a major English-speaking nation, English is not necessarily our first language if we are being politically correct. In that case, we were guessing that nations like Singapore and probably India to get Clubhouse first before Malaysia. India mostly because of its population density and the various Android devices that the market houses as well. The large and diverse sample sizes could prove useful for the Clubhouse development team in bug testing, stress testing, and even diagnosing porting issues.
We were proven wrong though. Just a week in and Clubhouse announced that the rest of the world will be getting Clubhouse on their Android devices. According to their twitter post that is about 14 hours old, the Clubhouse version of Android will see the light of day in Japan, Brazil, and Russia by Tuesday; that is tomorrow. Nigeria and India will see the Clubhouse app by Friday morning. The rest of the world will get the app by Friday too, albeit in the afternoon. Our prediction that India might get the stuff sooner than Malaysia did sort of come true.
Clubhouse on Android, as per mentioned last week, is still in Beta stage though. There will still be some bugs on the app, and we can expect the Android app to not have all the features available to users from the iOS camp. We are expecting improvements to come over the coming months to bring the Android version of the app to what the iOS users are already familiar with though. The only function we do not expect to make it into the Android app in Malaysia at least is their payments function. That feature is also not available on Clubhouse on iOS in Malaysia too.
You can expect Clubhouse to gain traction quickly in the Android playing field too. Despite other social media giants like Twitter and Facebook launching their own Clubhouse-like features, they have not gained the traction to match Clubhouse and therefore proved unpopular among users. But of course, there is one thing that might prevent a large influx of Android users into Clubhouse though. Clubhouse remains an invite-only platform. For you to start an account with Clubhouse and join conversations, you must have an invite from your friends already on the platform.
There are also issues and controversies raised surrounding the app itself too. There are issues concerning its security and privacy at some point. The app has also been criticized for not being friendly to the hearing-impaired community. The app is still quite young though; it is barely a year old, to be fair. There is still plenty to improve on at this point. Currently, the app has focused a little more on creators with plans to fund over 50 audio shows on Clubhouse as part of an accelerator program. They are also planning to introduce in-room tipping for creators, paid events, and even subscriptions into Clubhouse soon. Live podcasting from us anyone?
