X launches completely rebuilt Android app after year-long overhaul

X, Elon Musk’s social platform, released a completely rebuilt Android application early Tuesday morning Beijing time, delivering on a promise made nearly a year ago to fix the platform’s long-neglected Android experience.

The new app was written from scratch, not patched from the old codebase. X’s product lead Nikita Bier said the rewrite was one of the largest engineering projects in the company’s history. The team focused on three areas that had plagued the Android version for years: content loading speed, page scrolling smoothness, and notification reliability.

The backstory explains why the rewrite was necessary. For years, X (then Twitter) treated its Android app as a second-class citizen compared to the iOS version. The gap widened under Musk’s ownership, and by mid-2025 the situation had deteriorated to the point where clicking a link sometimes failed to load the post at all. Users on Android got a consistently worse experience — slower feeds, buggier interactions, and delayed notifications.

Last August, Bier announced that X had assembled an Android “dream team” to tackle the problem from the ground up. By October, the platform recorded one of its highest weeks for Android downloads, which reinforced the urgency. The new version is the result of that effort.

Bier acknowledged that the rebuild isn’t finished. The team is still working on improving performance on older Android devices and bringing the live audio feature Spaces to the app. Coming soon: a rebuilt video editor, video replies, a stock ticker tab, and customizable timelines.

The timing matters. Android accounts for roughly 70 percent of the global smartphone market, and X has been losing ground to competitors like Bluesky and Threads. A broken Android app was a self-inflicted wound. With this release, X has closed the gap — at least on the technical side.