We’re not even sure if this matters anymore, but Clubhouse has officially landed on the Play Store. A few weeks back, the company announced that it had opened a beta program for the Android app, claiming that it would officially arrive sometime in May. “Sometime” has turned into last night, as the company took to Twitter stating that the app is now officially available on Android “across the globe!”
At the time of this writing, Clubhouse for Android already has more than 100,000 downloads with a not-so-great rating of 3.9 out of 5 stars. Many of the early one-star reviews are so low due to issues with the phone number verification process after you actually receive an invitation. This has since been remedied, as the developers replied to some reviews stating that “SMS verification might have failed due to unusually high traffic”. Looking at the rest of the reviews, it’s clear that people have grown tired of invitation systems, and we quite agree.
Dear everyone, everywhere: @Android is officially live across the globe!
❤️👋
— Clubhouse (@Clubhouse) May 21, 2021
The premise of Clubhouse is to offer “drop-in voice chat”, while allowing users to create “rooms” with select moderators and speakers. You can even set the room to have only listeners, in some sort of odd way to have a random live podcast or something.
Clubhouse might struggle to gain in popularity despite seeing celebrities like Elon Musk and some of your favorite influencers/creators using the app. That’s because Twitter Spaces has been available for a little while now, essentially offering the same functionality without needing to deal with an invite system. The only real hangup to using or creating Twitter Spaces is that you must have at least 600 Twitter followers. Other than that, it’s free reign to create all the Spaces you could want.