As Twitter flounders, Mastodon refreshes its official app for Android users

https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/03/as-twitter-flounders-mastodon-refreshes-its-official-app-for-android-users/

Sarah Perez@sarahintampa / 12:48 PM PDT•July 3, 2023



While Twitter is busy limiting the number of readable tweets and breaking its TweetDeck app, open source Twitter alternative Mastodon is celebrating the launch of a significant refresh of its Android app. The new app, released over the weekend, features a complete Material You redesign — Google’s design language for Android — as well as revamped features such as tab bars, settings, a compose screen, and more.

Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko shared news of the update on the Mastodon blog, as the social network — including its mobile apps, web version, and third-party clients — now reaches an active user base of 1.4 million monthly active users according to the company’s own data. That monthly active figure is up 19%, the website also notes, but is down from Mastodon’s peak popularity in the wake of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover late last year, when it had then seen 2.5 million monthly users.

Today, Rochko shared that the number of active users across Mastodon rose by 294,000 over the weekend, and posting activity roughly tripled — figures likely tied to Twitter’s troubles.

According to Rochko, the new Android app out now features dozens of ways to customize the user experience in the new settings screen, ranging from being able to change the default posting language, to reminding yourself to add alternative text for your media uploads, to being able to hide the “boost” and “favorite” counters — the former, Mastodon’s version of Twitter’s retweet.