Buzzed-about social network Clubhouse has been made available for Android users in Australia.
The voice-based application can be downloaded through the Google Play Store, allowing Aussie Android users to join Clubhouse’s rapidly growing number of users – around 10 million and counting, with an average 300,000 rooms created daily.
While Australian Android users can download the app onto their devices directly from the Google Play store, it still requires an invite from a current user to be able to begin using it immediately. Those that don’t get invites can reserve their username and be placed on a waitlist.
Clubhouse says its invite-only approach is necessary to ensure the app is not overloaded and to ensure that time is taken to fine-tune the system.
“Earlier this year, Clubhouse started growing very quickly, as people all over the world began inviting their friends faster than we had ever expected,” the Clubhouse founders, entrepreneur Paul Davison and former Google engineer Rohan Seth, said in a statement.
“This had its downsides, as the load stressed our systems—causing widespread server outages and notification failures, and surpassing the limits of our early discovery algorithms. It made us shift our focus to hiring, fixing, and company building, rather than the community meetups and product features that we normally like to focus on. It was an important time of investment, which we think will help us serve the community much better in the long run.”
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The social network allows users to talk, listen and learn from each other in real-time in virtual ‘rooms’ of people. There are “open rooms”, which can be joined by anyone; “social rooms”, which only allows users the moderator follows to join; and “closed rooms”, with users needing a direct invite from moderators.
First officially released on the iOS system in March 2020, Clubhouse has grown rapidly – particularly for a network that is still in various beta stages. The platform has already been host to a number of high-profile interactions, including a highly-publicised back and forth in February between Elon Musk and Vladimir Tenev, the CEO of broker-dealer app RobinHood.
Not to be outdone, a number of rivals – including Facebook, Twitter, Discord, Spotify, Reddit, and Slack – are now incorporating Clubhouse-style audio products to compete.
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