14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter has finally turned its gaze towards the Android riffraff and decided they have suffered enough deprivation of access to the popular Vine video app. In its benevolence, Twitter has now unveiled Vine for Android.
The app, much like its iPhone counterpart, makes it possible to shoot, edit, and publish six-second (actually six and a half second) videos for your adoring fans.
We'll have to wait and see whether the inclusion of Android users will have the same effect that it had on Instagram when it opened its doors to the droid people.
That said, Vine hasn't been that exclusivist, as there already are 13 million users, surely to Twitter's delight.
The new Android app isn't on par with the iOS one, which comes with a few more features, but Twitter promises that the gap will narrow in the coming weeks with a series of quick updates.
Vine has been quite a success for Twitter. It's also the first standalone service Twitter has offered besides Twitter itself.
While the mobile video space is still in the early stages and there's plenty of competition, Vine's unique features, mostly the fact that videos can't be longer than six seconds, have made it an early winner, at least in some corners.
Expanding to Android will only mean more users. Still, to date, Vine has had a minimal presence on the web. That's going to change, but the service will continue to be mobile first. However, if Instagram can expand onto the desktop web, Vine can as well.
Likewise for the Twitter integration. Right now, Vine might as well be just another app using the Twitter API. That's not necessarily a bad thing; shoving Twitter into Vine where it doesn't fit wouldn't be a wise choice, but we're bound to see better and deeper integration in the future.