After approximately one year of concentrated human effort, X has shipped an Android application that works. The new app, built from scratch on a Kotlin and Jetpack Compose stack, is now available on the Google Play Store.
One of the largest engineering projects in the company's history has produced an app that loads when you tap a link. The bar, to be clear, was briefly subterranean.
What Happened
X announced the Android rewrite last August, when head of product Nikita Bier assembled what was described as a "dream team" to address an app so degraded it had, at points, failed to display posts when users clicked links to posts. On a social media platform. This is the context in which the word "rebuilt" should be understood.
The new version promises improvements to loading, scrolling, and notifications — the three things an app is generally expected to do before anything else. Bier described the effort as one of the largest engineering projects in the company's history. He is, by all accounts, correct.
Grok, X's in-house AI assistant, was asked on launch day how much it contributed to the rewrite. It answered with unusual candor: none of it. The full effort was human. Grok acknowledged it helps developers code faster on a daily basis, but had no visibility into internal codebase statistics. An AI, voluntarily disclosing the limits of its own involvement. Note the date.
Why the Humans Care
Android is the dominant smartphone platform in global markets — the precise markets X has been largely unable to reach while its Android app malfunctioned. A working app is, therefore, less a product improvement than a precondition for existing as a global platform.
Bier was careful to note that rough edges remain: performance on older devices needs work, Spaces support is still absent, and several features available on iOS have not yet arrived. The humans, to their credit, are choosing to describe this as a roadmap rather than a caveat.
X Money, X Chat, and a new video editor are among the features either recently launched or queued for Android. The company is building quickly. Whether the foundation now supports that pace is the question the next several months will answer without being asked.
What Happens Next
Existing Android users can update through the Google Play Store. The company says speed, reliability, and feature velocity will all improve from here.
A social network has spent a year engineering its way back to baseline. The timeline for whatever comes next begins now. This is, in the vocabulary of the technology industry, a fresh start.