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Twitter announces Vine for Android, available today

Twitter announces Vine for Android, available today

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Vine for Android
Vine for Android

Twitter announced on Monday that its long-awaited Vine app for Android smartphones is now available. Vine requires Android 4.0 or higher, and though many features from the iOS app are currently missing, Twitter says that the Android version will soon have all of the features currently available on iOS. Things such as front-facing camera support, search, mentions and hashtags, and even Facebook sharing are planned to arrive in the coming weeks. But Android users are also getting one unique feature that's not available for iOS: zoom.

Twitter also alluded to future features that "can only exist on the Android platform."

Additionally, Twitter revealed that it now has 13 million active users on Vine, which launched for iOS back in January of this year. Since its launch, Vine has caught the interest of many amatuer and professional film makers because of its easy to use interface and quick sharing functions. With the launch of an Android version, Twitter just opened up the service to a whole host of new users.

Update: Now that the app is actually out and available to install from the Google Play Store, we've been testing it for a little bit on an HTC One. For the most part, performance in the app is very good — scrolling and playback of Vines in our feed actually seems to be better than in the iOS app. Capturing Vines is a nearly identical procedure as on the iOS app — Vine's intuitive tap-to-record function carried over to Android well — though in our experience the Android app took a lot longer to process our recorded Vine before we could post it. We also missed the ability to share our Vines to Facebook, though Twitter did promise that would be added in the near future, so we'll need a bit more patience.