X rebuilt its Android app from scratch after years of neglect

The Android version of X has been a second-class citizen for so long that last year, the app literally couldn’t load posts when users clicked links. That’s the kind of neglect that kills a platform in markets like India or Brazil, where Android is the dominant operating system by a mile. On Monday, X finally shipped a ground-up rebuild that aims to fix all of it.

Product head Nikita Bier called the effort “one of the largest engineering projects” in the company’s history. The team didn’t just polish the old codebase — they scrapped it entirely. The result, Bier claims, is an app that’s “faster, smoother and more reliable,” but the real payoff is architectural. A clean foundation means X can ship new features to Android at something approaching iOS speed, rather than treating every update like a multi-month porting project.

The timing isn’t accidental. Last October, X recorded one of its biggest weeks ever for Android downloads, a signal that finally forced leadership to prioritize the platform. Since then, the company has been rolling out standalone apps like X Money and X Chat, and an Android user base that can’t access them is a liability Elon Musk’s super-app ambitions can’t afford.

Bier was upfront that the release still has rough edges — performance on older devices needs work, and Spaces support is still missing entirely. A new video editor, the react-with-video feature, cashtags, and custom timelines are all tagged as “coming soon.” But for a platform whose Android app was literally breaking on link clicks a year ago, functional parity is a genuine milestone. Whether it’s enough to win back users who bailed during the neglect years is the harder question.