The invite-only chatroom platform that every big tech company is trying to emulate, Clubhouse, recently rolled out access to the Android version of the app in the United States earlier this month. While that’s great if you reside Stateside, the immediate question for us was when other parts of the globe would get access, and specifically Android users in South Africa.
A tweet sent out by the official Clubhouse Twitter account has provided some clarity on that front, with the app rolling out to selected countries during the course of this week before being made available globally by Friday afternoon.
Android rollout continues!
???????????????? ???????? Japan, Brazil & Russia coming Tuesday
???????????????? Nigeria & India on Friday AM
???? Rest of world throughout the week, and available worldwide by Friday afternoon— Clubhouse (@Clubhouse) May 16, 2021
With the iOS version of the app already available in South Africa, it will be interesting to see what happens in terms of the chatroom platform’s popularity once the Android flavour lands locally. Also of interest is what this means for the likes of Twitter’s Spaces, which rolled out in part to the microblogging site’s community this month as well, with a follower threshold of 600 needed to gain access to the feature.
Now that Clubhouse is readying for a wider release, we don’t think it will be long before Spaces does the same.
It was also quite intriguing to see which countries Clubhouse chose to launch the Android version of the app in before the global release, with BRICS nations Brazil, Russia and India all getting in before SA. Nigeria has pipped us too, which means our mobile market may not be as a key a territory as we may think it is, particular when it comes to Android.
That’s a discussion for another time, however, as our attention is now on whether or not the wide-scale release of Clubhouse may end up harming the platform in the long run, particularly as the invite-only nature and vetting from influential online entities like Elon Musk helped it gain significant traction at the beginning of the year.
Either way, it is an interesting time as far as spatial audio is concerned.
[Image – Photo by William Krause on Unsplash]