The Vine, a social media platform owned by Twitter that allows users to share short GIF-style looping videos, has been released as an app for Android.
“Vine for Android has many of the features that more than 13 million people have grown to love: easy video creation with automatic playback and sound; Explore, where you can discover popular posts and see what’s trending; and Find Friends, where you can find and invite people you know to join,” The Vine’s Android engineer, Sara Haider, says in a statement.
“Over the coming weeks, you’ll see frequent updates with new features – including front-facing camera, search, mentions and hashtags, and the ability to share to Facebook – as well as bug fixes and performance improvements. Of course, this is only the beginning – we have exciting plans for features that could exist only on Android,” Haider says.
The social media service acknowledges that features and updated for the Android version will initially be out of sync with the Apple version, but promises that won’t be the case for long.
The Vine is now available on Google Play for users of smartphones running Android 4.0 or higher (Ice Cream Sandwich or Jellybean).
As SmartCompany reported, Twitter first unveiled the micro-video site in January, although at the time it only released an app for iPhone and iPod Touch.
“Like tweets, the brevity of videos on Vine (six seconds or less) inspires creativity. Now that you can easily capture motion and sound, we look forward to seeing what you create,” Twitter stated in its original introduction.
Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
