Clubhouse, the audio-based social network, is finally bringing its app to Android in its first public beta version after more than a year of iOS exclusivity. Clubhouse Android version will open the gate to the afflux of new users the app desperately needs.
The beta for Clubhouse’s audio-only chatrooms is currently only available to U.S. users on an invite-only basis. All you need to do in order to get access is sign up and fill out a quick form that includes your name and phone number. The audio social media app has seen a significant decline in its monthly downloads, which dipped from 9.5 million to 2.7 million in a month and 900,000 in another.
Upon releasing the new Android version of their app, Clubhouse has said that it will be gradually rolling out the Android version to other English-speaking markets and then to the rest of the world.
If you live outside the US, you can pre-register by signing up (after receiving an invitation) on the Clubhouse page to be alerted once the app becomes available in your country.
“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.
With the expanding user base, Clubhouse also plans to finally join many iOS users which were on their waiting list for some time now and to improve the app’s infrastructure this summer. The growth in iOS users necessitates the introduction of new languages and additional features in near future.
The Clubhouse’s slowing download rates could indicate that the general user base might not just be ready yet for another social media in their lives. Some experts believe that the initial growing trend for audio-only social media use could have been due to the pandemic, where people being isolating at home for most of the time and were looking for new ways of interacting with others.
As the summer is coming, weather getting better, people being more outdoors than indoors and together with the covid pandemic being in retreat in the US, this all might have contributed to the declining trend.
Other media suggest that the sign-ups of high profile tech celebrities Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to the platform was behind the rapid increase of the interest in the Clubhouse app earlier this year. This may, however, be just temporary and together with the invite-only system, which we have seen before (Google Plus, looking at you) might not convice many other, so needed active users to join the platform in the long-term view.
Perhaps this will change with the introduction of the Android app with millions of potential new users.
