Twitter launches Vine for Android

What do you know. Android users will now be able to enjoy the awesomeness of Vine, Twitter announced today. It seems the social network finally decided to roll out the service for its millions of Android users:

Android owners: Welcome to Vine. Starting today, you can begin to shoot, share and watch short looping videos. We’ve been looking forward to this day, and we’re excited to get the app into your hands.

That’s what happens when Will Wheaton wants something:

I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but … I really want Vine to work on my Android phone, because it looks like so much fun.

— Wil Wheaton (@wilw) March 6, 2013

According to Twitter, the new users will join Vine’s 13-million plus current users and will enjoy the same features that iPhone owners enjoy. Users will be able to easily create videos and instantly share it on the social media platform Instagram-style.

With features that allow you to “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. You can also share your posts to Twitter –– people will be able to watch them right within your tweet. Oh, and we added a feature that’s unique to Android: zoom”.

The Android version arrives just five months after the launch of its iPhone counterpart. Twitter has released a host of new features since then and this Android version isn’t quite complete as the company said it will release more features in the future.

Though we’ve been very focused on releasing Vine for Android, we’ve continued to release updates and add new features to the iOS app. As a result, the two apps are not perfectly in sync, but that won’t be the case for long. 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.

It will be interesting to see if Vine gets the same numbers boost that Instagram saw when it launched an Android version. Whether or not the app makes its way to other platforms remains to be seen.