Android users, do you feel left out by all of the fun your iPhone-wielding counterparts are having with their quirky 6-second videos? Well, you don’t have that much longer to wait until you can join in.
Vine, Twitter’s new 6-second video app, is on the way to Android “soon.”
Speaking to The Verge, Vine Co-founder Dom Hofmann confirmed the “soon” timeframe. Nothing more, nothing less. Just “soon.” We always knew that an Android version of the popular app must be in the works, but this is the first time that we’ve heard that it is indeed on the horizon. Back in February, Vine began looking for a lead Android engineer.
He also said that a new feature is coming to the iOS version – friend tagging. But it’s currently waiting for final Apple approval.
Vine has seen quite a bit of success after its rocky start. Vine launched back in January and immediately found itself in the middle of a porn controversy. Users were shocked to find that people were using the service to post 6-second porn clips. Vine doesn’t specifically ban nudity in their terms, but they did mess up handily when they accidentally promoted an explicit video as one of their editor’s picks.
With poor user feedback and the threat of a ban in Apple’s notoriously conservative App Store, Vine made some changes to bury NSFW content deep down in the app.
But soon, we saw Vine being used in a variety of ways: for promotion and for politics. For comedy and for game teasers. Vine even played a pretty big role in raw footage from the Boston Marathon bombings.
When Vine finally comes to Android, you can expect its presence to rise significantly. It’ll probably look a lot like the moment when Instagram finally launched on Android – but this time I don’t expect iOS users to get all pissy about their favorite app opening up to the masses.