Clubhouse and the Primacy of iPhone

From a post on Clubhouse’s blog a few weeks ago, laying out their plans for 2021:

From the earliest days, we’ve wanted to build Clubhouse for everyone. With this in mind, we are thrilled to begin work on our Android app soon, and to add more accessibility and localization features so that people all over the world can experience Clubhouse in a way that feels native to them.

Clubhouse, though it remains invitation-only, is growing fast, and has a lot of buzz. And it remains iPhone-only. They’ve only just begun working on an Android app. Nothing in this regard has changed in the 10 years since Instagram launched as an iPhone-only app in October 2010. Expanding to Android is inevitable, but it can wait. Conversely, if Clubhouse were Android-only, it’s likely almost no one would have heard of it today. I don’t really even see anyone talking about this with Clubhouse. It just goes unnoticed, like the oxygen we breathe, that iPhone is dominant, culturally.

See also: Ben Thompson: “Clubhouse’s Inevitability”.

★ Monday, 15 February 2021