The official Mastodon application for Android has arrived

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We are very happy to announce some good news! The official Mastodon app has arrived for Android on the Play Store, the one for iOS had already been released in mid-2021 ¹. Although this may seem like unimportant news, in our opinion it is a very important step to give a general sense of security and safety modernity to all the Mastodon project (and more generally to fediverso and alternative social networks), especially for those who come from important and famous realities such as Twitter for example.

The official Mastodon application for Android has arrived

We have now talked about Mastodon hundreds of times and we think that those who read us now know well what we are talking about. However, if you have any doubts, we don't want to leave anyone behind: read our dedicated article first What is Mastodon and how does it work?, we are sure that it will clarify all your doubts.

We said that the official application is an important step in our opinion and the Mastodon developers must have thought the same thing too. We have in fact followed the project through theirs Patreon and although initially the release was supposed to take place more gradually and the development took longer, it was decided to speed up the process considerably because of Elon Musk.

The development was accelerated due to the fault/merit of Elon Musk

We want to speed up the process and release it sooner to make use of the heightened attention on Mastodon due to the news of Elon Musk becoming a Twitter shareholder (Mastodon was trending on Twitter yesterday).

A post from Mastodon on Patreon

When Elon Musk has become a shareholder of Twitter ² it was trending on the social network Mastodon ³. The developers therefore did not want to be caught unprepared and decided to speed up the process. And in fact in just a few days we went from "from today you can try our beta on Android!" to “The application has been released on the Play Store and is available to anyone!”. More precisely the public beta only lasted from March 29th ⁴ to April 18th.

The official Mastodon app for Android is beautiful and smooth

We tested the application from the first possible day and it immediately seemed free of major bugs. We are still experimenting with it and it is really well made: fluid and very pleasing to the eye. It is really intuitive and one of the compromises made was the elimination of the local, global and federated timelines which can lead to a bit of confusion for those who have recently started to learn about the fediverse. They decided to focus more on the hasthag trending and recommending following the most active users.

We tested it with a degoogled smartphone but with Google services (microG) installed and we had no problems with notifications.

The other applications to use Mastodon on Android

We conclude by saying that Mastodon is and remains obviously Open source and free software. Anyone can develop applications to use Mastodon and it is still absolutely not mandatory nor in any way binding to use the official application and we are quite certain that it never will be. In fact, if you don't like the official application you can always use it Fedilab or Tusky for example.

One last gem: the Mastodon application for Android was developed by Gregory Klyushnikov better known in the fediverse as grishka. If the name doesn't mean anything to you, he is a very talented developer who has worked for VKontakte and Telegram ⁵.

Where to find it

The application is available both on the Play Store and on F-Droid.

1. Mastodon now has an official iPhone app[↩]
2. Elon Musk becomes a shareholder of Twitter: bought the company's 9%, the stock soars on the stock market[↩]
3. Elon Musk's takeover bid of Twitter puts a spotlight on Mastodon[↩]
4. Mastodon for Android beta[↩]
5. Official Mastodon for Android app is coming soon[↩]

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