Clubhouse Enters Android; Pre Registration For India Available

The 2020-found social media platform that took the Internet by storm has finally embraced Android. Clubhouse, the popular live audio discussion platform started in March 2020, hogged the limelight in the initial months of 2021 after celebrities such as Elon Musk and Oprah Winfrey, among others, joined it.

Once an only exclusive platform to iOS devices has now had to tap the bigger market share i.e, Android, which dominates the smartphone market with a share of over 70 per cent compared with iOS at 20 per cent.

The Clubhouse is now available in beta mode in the US and is expected to be available in various regions soon. Pre-registration for the platform is already available for Indian Android users. The move comes after the download numbers dropped substantially over the month. The platform's downloads at its height of popularity saw 9.6 million installs in February this year. However, in March the number spiraled down to 2.7 million and in April it managed to get 9,22,000 installs only.

The platform is also facing heat from Twitter's Spaces which is slowly gaining momentum, as, unlike Clubhouse, Spaces will automatically allow users' followers to listen to the conversation. Twitter has also lately dropped the follower count to 600 to host Spaces. The Jack Dorsey-led micro-blogging platform, in a bid to avert content creators leaving Twitter, has also introduced "Tip Jar' that will allow users to earn through tips sent by followers.

Though the Clubhouse developers have always indicated that the platform will eventually be made available on Android, and the work on it already started at the onset of this year, the exclusivity of the platform will now cease to exist.

What will be interesting is to see how Clubhouse responds to aggressive development by Spaces. Apart from this, once Clubhouse is made available for Android users in India, the fate of Clubhouse alternatives such as Leher will be watched closely.