X has shipped a completely rebuilt Android app after more than a year of work led by Head of Product Nikita Bier. The company describes the release as faster, smoother, and more reliable than the previous version, though it openly admits the project is unfinished. Hosting for Spaces and better performance on older devices are still on the way, along with other tools such as React with Video and a video editor. Bier called the effort one of the largest engineering projects in the company’s history and noted that a small team of roughly a dozen people handled the rebuild from scratch so new features could ship more quickly.
Several additions are already live, including Cashtags and custom timelines. Future features will reach Android before iOS, a reversal of the usual industry habit of favoring Apple’s platform first. That shift could matter in markets where Android holds the larger share of users. Bier has invited feedback on remaining rough edges and bugs, signaling that the app is still in active refinement rather than a polished final product.
Rebuilding a major social app from the ground up is rarely simple. Twitter’s Android client spent years accumulating technical debt, inconsistent updates, and performance complaints long before the rebrand to X. Starting over with a lean team can remove that baggage and speed up iteration, yet it also risks introducing fresh instability, especially when core functions like Spaces remain incomplete at launch. Similar full rewrites at other platforms have sometimes delivered cleaner code only after months of public testing and patches. The decision to prioritize Android for upcoming features acknowledges where much of the global audience actually sits, though it also places extra pressure on the smaller engineering group to maintain quality across a wide range of devices and network conditions.
The release continues X’s pattern of rapid, sometimes uneven changes under its current ownership. Users who have stuck with the app through earlier redesigns and feature churn now get a cleaner foundation, but they will also serve as the testing ground for the missing pieces. Whether the promised speed in shipping new tools outweighs the temporary gaps will become clearer once Spaces hosting and older-device optimizations arrive. For international Android users in particular, the update offers a chance at faster access to whatever comes next, provided the remaining work lands without repeating the reliability problems that prompted the rebuild in the first place.
