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X rebuilds Android app for faster feature releases
X rebuilt its Android app from scratch after nearly a year, promising smoother performance, more reliable notifications, and faster feature releases.
Image: ITzine
X has rebuilt its Android app from the ground up after nearly a year of work, releasing the new version through Google Play. Nikita Bier, the company’s head of product, called it one of the largest engineering projects in X’s history.
The rewrite is intended to deliver more than faster performance and smoother scrolling. X says the new architecture should also speed up feature releases on Android, a significant change for a platform that accounts for roughly 70% of the global smartphone market.
The company is also trying to address a long-standing imbalance between its mobile apps. New features often appeared on iPhone first, leaving Android users waiting for months. Bier described the project as a move to an entirely new codebase rather than a series of incremental changes to the old app.
According to X, the rebuilt application should provide:
- Faster startup and smoother scrolling
- More reliable notifications
- Earlier Android releases for new features
- A codebase rebuilt from scratch rather than layered over the previous version
The new app is already being distributed through Google Play.
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X separates more products into standalone apps
The Android relaunch follows X’s broader move toward splitting parts of its service into separate products. In November, the company released X Chat as a standalone app. Its payments initiative, X Money, is also being developed separately and remains available by invitation only.
Other major platforms have taken similar approaches in recent years, as releasing updates can be simpler without carrying an entire legacy codebase. For X, the rebuild is also an attempt to change perceptions of an Android app that users have criticized in reviews for crashes and usability problems.
If the new architecture delivers faster releases, the gap between X’s Android and iPhone apps could begin narrowing in upcoming updates.
Ilya Ignatov is a technology journalist and news writer. He graduated from the Moscow Technical University of Communications and Informatics with a degree in information security and has covered hardware, software, and consumer electronics since 2018.
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via ITzine
