Twitter for Android: Robots like to share too
When we tweet what's happening around us, we share not only our thoughts, but also web pages, photos, videos, location...anything. Mobile phones are increasingly part of our lives, and we seem to be doing everything but making phone calls.
Context & Ripple Effects
Three weeks after shipping an official client for iOS in Twitter for iPhone, Twitter is extending the same first-party approach to Android. The move caps a busy month that included the Annotations announcement at Chirp and a stated plan to identify places from the coordinates of geo-coded tweets — the app's emphasis on attaching photos, videos and location to tweets slots directly into the location land race that also has Foursquare and Gowalla sprinting.
The story's rough edge comes via syndication: Silicon Alley Insider framed the launch less as a feature than as Android fragmentation in action, noting the official app will not run on many Google-branded phones — meaning Twitter's own platform choice excludes part of its addressable audience.
First-order effects
- Android users gain an official Twitter client built for rich sharing — web pages, photos, videos and location — rather than relying on third-party apps.
- Owners of many Google phones are locked out of the official app entirely, a direct cost of Android's fragmented device base landing on Twitter's launch.
Second-order effects
- Third-party Android Twitter clients now compete against a first-party alternative on the platform where they had the freest rein, echoing the developer anxiety Twitter already stirred days before Chirp with its pre-conference announcements.
- Foursquare and Gowalla face a rival that can attach location to an existing, massive social graph from the phone in every pocket, rather than asking users to check in through a dedicated app.
Third-order effects
- If Twitter keeps pairing native mobile clients with geo-coded tweet infrastructure, the company positions itself as a location layer competing with check-in services — pushing the industry toward an open database of places, as analysts argued amid the fragmented land rush.
- The episode hardens a lesson for Android-first developers: fragmentation turns 'official app available' into a subset of 'platform available', making device support matrices a strategic question, not a technical footnote.
The trend: In 2010 Twitter is consolidating its mobile experience around official first-party apps while racing Foursquare and Gowalla to make location a native part of the tweet.