Twitter announced today it’s opening up its live audio chat rooms, known as Twitter Spaces, to users on Android. Previously, the experience was only open to select users on iOS following the product’s private beta launch in late December 2020. The company says that Android users will only be able to join and talk in Spaces for the time being, but won’t yet be able to start their own. That added functionality is expected to ship “soon,” Twitter says, without offering an exact timeframe.
The company has been working quickly to iterate on Twitter Spaces in the months since its beta debut and has been fairly transparent about its roadmap. Last month, the team developing Twitter Spaces hosted a Space where users were invited to offer feedback, ask questions, and learn about what Twitter had in the works for the product in both the near-term and further down the road. During this live chat, Twitter confirmed that Spaces would arrive on Android in March. It also promised a fix to how it displays listeners, which has since rolled out.
Other Spaces features are being shared in public as they’re designed and prototyped, including things like titles and descriptions, scheduling options, support for co-hosts and moderators, guest lists, and more. Twitter has also updated the preview card that appears in the timeline and relabeled its “captions” feature to be more accurate, from an accessibility standpoint.
The time frame of some of its new developments like Android and scheduling options were being promised in a matter of weeks, not months. This fast pace has now led Twitter to beat its rival Clubhouse the app currently leading the “social audio” market to offer support for Android. Today, Clubhouse remains iOS-only in addition to being invite-only.