When Vine for Android debuted last month, it was met with trepidatious enthusiasm. For an app so decidedly built for the iPhone, Vine for Android was clearly rushed after the company was acquired and subsumed into Twitter.
The first release was, for lack of a better word, bad. It was slow, both to load Vines and create them, and lacked much of the functionality of its iOS counterpart. Users could not search; they could not share; they could barely create, as rendering speeds were absolutely awful.
There’s a glimmer of hope today for avid Vine fans, only two days after Instagram released a version of its app for both iOS and Android that adds 15-second video capture (with filters!). Vine 1.1 adds search, both for users and hashtags, along with sharing to Facebook, one of the most-requested additions.
More importantly, video rendering speed has been substantially improved, from around 30 seconds to less than five in the case of my HTC One. Vine also promises better audio synchronization and fewer stutters on older devices.
Users can also clear their cache in the Settings, as users of earlier versions discovered that the app was consuming as much as 1GB of internal storage. While it’s not possible to limit the amount of cache stored on the device, users can see how much space storing Vines is taking and decide accordingly.
The main omission still in Vine for Android is front-facing camera support, which only came to the iPhone long after its release. We’re sure the development team is working hard to reach feature parity, and look forward to seeing what the company has in store for future versions.
Download Vine for Android.
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