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Do you use Vine? If you have no idea what Vine is you should catch up. Vine is a social network that was started by Twitter. The Vine app, and the entire social network, is tied in to Twitter. Vine lets users share six second video clips, with sound. Like Twitter, the medium is intriguing because of the constraints that users have to adhere to. Up until now Android users had to be on 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich or higher in order to use the Vine app. Thankfully, the development team behind the Vine app wants everyone to be able to play. They announced today on the Vine blog that they are updating the app to include all Android devices that are running Android 2.3 Gingerbread and up. If you’re still using a device that’s running Gingerbread, what are you doing? Upgrade your device. But at least you can use the Vine for Android app now.
If you download the Vine app on a smartphone or tablet that’s running Gingerbread, you won’t get the full Vine experience. You’ll be able to view Vines, but you won’t be able to record your own six second videos. The Vine team says that this is due to the “device limitations” of older Android equipment. That’s a fair point because Gingerbread is a three year old OS. You will be able to view Vines and keep up with the awesome videos that your friends are making.
This type of news is the kind that we don’t hear very often. Most app developers are moving to support only devices running Android 4.0 and up. Rather than ignoring the millions of users running Gingerbread, Vine decided to spend some time and offer then something. Even though Gingerbread users can’t post, it’s nice to see an app development team giving some love to these older devices.
This also feels like a move on the part of Vine to boost app installs and “user adoption.” I put user adoption in quotation marks because these users won’t be able to contribute to the Vine network. I’m sure that Twitter and Vine will conveniently leave out that fact the next they report Vine adoption numbers.
