X has put an end to a long period of waiting for Android users, releasing a new version of the completely rebuilt mobile application. The update is the result of almost twelve months of intensive development, dedicated to resolving the historical critical issues that afflicted the platform and which made it inferior to its iOS counterpart.
The official X announcement highlights how the new Android app was designed and programmed from scratch, not limited to a simple incremental update. The expected benefits affect several crucial aspects of the user experience: there is talk of significant improvements in content loading times, in the fluidity of scrolling and in the effectiveness of notifications.
The new X app is here, finally!
The path towards this major overhaul began almost a year ago. Already in the previous August, Nikita BierX’s product manager at the time, announced the formation of an Android “dream team”. The goal was to completely rethink the user experience on the most popular mobile platform in the world. This commitment was no coincidence: the company recorded one of its historical download peaks on Android in October, highlighting a large and active user base that deserved priority attention.
Bier described the project as one of “greatest engineering efforts” in the history of the company. The choice to rebuild the app from scratch, rather than modify it, underlines the desire to structurally overcome pre-existing problems, laying the foundations for faster and more efficient future development. “It’s faster, smoother and more reliable. But most importantly, it will allow us to develop new features at lightning speed,” Bier said of X, adding that this new architecture will allow the team to develop new features more quickly.
It is no coincidence that Bier insisted on this point: in recent periods, the platform owned by Elon Musk has intensified the pace of launching new features, including X Money and X Chat, both released as autonomous applications distinct from the main app. A more solid technical base on Android was therefore considered an essential prerequisite to continue to support this pace of innovation also on Google’s operating system.
The update for Android is intended to resolve years of neglect that had penalized users of the platform. In the past, problems had gotten to the point where the application failed to load posts correctly when users clicked on external links, severely affecting usability. This shortcoming has created a clear gap with the experience offered to iOS users.
Among the aspects to be further improved, according to Bier, is the need to further optimize performance on older Android devices and to implement support for Spaces, X’s live audio feature. These updates are already in development. Other features, already present or arriving for other systems, will soon be integrated on Android too. Bier mentioned in particular the new video editor, the ability to react to posts with videos (react-with-video), cashtags (symbols to identify stocks or cryptocurrencies) and personalized timelines, which promise to further enrich the experience on the platform in the coming months.
