A year of penance for Android users
Using X on Android has meant settling for the discount version for years. Slower feeds. Broken links. Features that hit iOS months earlier, or never made the trip at all. On July 20, X finally shipped its answer — an Android app rebuilt from scratch over roughly a year, now rolling out worldwide through the Play Store.
The company isn't being humble about it. The new app is faster, smoother, and more reliable "in every way," according to X's engineering team. Nikita Bier, X's head of product, called the rewrite one of the largest engineering projects in company history.
Why a full rewrite
The old app wasn't just dated — it was failing at the basics. At its low point last year, it couldn't reliably open posts when you tapped a link. Tap, spin, nothing. That's the core product, broken.
The gap with iOS had grown so wide that leadership stopped considering patches. Only a full architectural overhaul would get Android to real parity, so Bier assembled a dedicated Android "dream team" last August. October added urgency: X logged one of its biggest weeks ever for Android downloads, meaning growth was arriving on the platform's weakest surface.
What's under the hood
The rewrite runs on Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, Google's modern Android toolkit. And it was, notably, humans all the way down — when users joked that Grok must have written it, the chatbot's own account replied that the rebuild was a "human engineering feat" by the X team.
The real payoff is speed in two senses. The app is quicker today, and the clean codebase means features can ship quicker tomorrow. There's a long queue waiting: the new video editor, react-with-video replies, cashtags, and custom timelines are all promised for Android soon. Spaces and better performance on older phones are still in progress — Bier admits the rough edges are real.
The bigger play
This wasn't housekeeping. Android dominates most of the world's growth markets, and a janky app puts a hard ceiling on user numbers there. The rebuild is also table stakes for X's everything-app ambitions — X Money and X Chat already run as standalone products, and the core app has to keep pace with a roadmap that keeps expanding.
If you're on Android, there's nothing clever to do: update in the Play Store and the new version lands. Whether it wins back the people the old app drove off — that's the next few months' story.
