X shipped a rebuilt Android app on Monday, ending nearly a year of work on a version that was built from scratch rather than patched together. The new app is live now, and existing Android users can get it by updating through the Google Play Store.
Nikita Bier said the rewrite was a human engineering feat on a clean Kotlin and Jetpack Compose stack, and he called it one of the largest engineering projects in the company’s history. He said the point was not just to make the app look newer, but to make it feel better every time someone opens it, with faster loading, smoother scrolling and more dependable notifications.
The timing matters because Android has been a weak point for X for years, and Bier has made a point of saying the company is finally treating it like a priority. Last August, he said X was assembling an Android dream team to reshape the experience, and in October he said the platform had one of its biggest weeks ever for downloads. That push now arrives as X tries to make its app feel less like a legacy product and more like a base for new work.
Bier’s pitch also carries a catch. He said performance on older Android devices still needs improvement, which means the rewrite is not finished for every user who will install it. Support for Spaces is still underway, and the new video editor, react-with-video, cashtags and custom timelines are still coming to Android. The company is also trying to move faster on other products, with X Money and X Chat already getting their own standalone apps.
That leaves the rebuilt Android app in a useful but incomplete state. X has fixed the foundation first, and that should make future updates easier to deliver. The open question is how quickly the unfinished pieces land for users who have waited through nearly a year of promises, especially those still stuck on older Android hardware.
