When Meerkat was all the rage, there were reports of big funding rounds, celebrity investors and a new dawn of digital communication. Forget YouTube, Meerkat turned smartphone users into live broadcasters, and all you needed was the app and a Twitter account. The hottest trend took its sweet time to make its way on to Android, but it finally did come, unfortunately for Meerkat however, Twitter was paying close attention. Enter, Periscope. Twitter’s own answer to Meerkat and as we all know, the Internet is a fickle, cruel mistress and the tide soon shifted to Periscope. Again, there was one problem; there was no Android app. Now though, that’s all changing as the official Perisope app has hit the Google Play Store today.
As Engadget is reporting, the Android version of the app was put together by Sara Haider, who used to head up the Twitter for Android team as well as the short-lived Secret network. She returned to Twitter back in March, and apparently got straight to work on the Android version of the Periscope app. The final result is an app that works with anything running Android 4.4 KitKat or above, and also features a myriad of Material Design elements including a global broadcast button, similar to the compose button in GMail. The app has been developed for Android by someone who clearly has experience in writing Android apps, which means that this is not a port and nor is it a buggy release that feels unfinished. Both are things that will help Periscope achieve new heights of popularity over the next few months. Especially with new releases like the Galaxy S6 and LG G4 starting to pick up steam.
The link included is now live in the Play Store, but as always it might be live for everyone as of writing. This is presumably a staged rollout, so some regions of the world might see it before others. Either way, we’ll update this post when the link appears to have populated for the majority of users.
