Clubhouse Will Be Available To The General Public Soon
Partly thanks to taking on the rather unconventional form of audio-only communication, Clubhouse quickly become one of the hottest names in social media since last year. Given its popularity, it might surprise some to discover that the social network is still an exclusive club that requires other members to invite you first in order to get in. It was ironically slow to expand even outside of iOS. Opening its doors to Android users seemingly also opened the floodgates and Clubhouse will no longer be an exclusive club starting sometime this summer.
Clubhouse recently explained that its slow expansion was intentional, even when faced with new rivals in that audio-only social networking space. It wanted to focus on more important aspects of growing the community and stabilizing features first rather than getting bogged down with server maintenance or rushed bug fixing from dozens of reports that would be coming in. It seems, however, that it has reached a point where it's ready to actually open the doors to everyone.
In one of its tweets highlighting its recent Town Hall, Clubhouse revealed that it already has more than 2 million Android users. That's rather impressive considering the Android app only went live earlier in May and that it isn't even in feature parity compared to iOS. It does prove that there were that many people just waiting for Clubhouse to arrive on their favorite mobile platform before jumping in.
More importantly, it also revealed its plans to make the network available to the general public this summer, presuming all goes well. Until then, it will be focusing on tasks that will make the network feel more complete to prepare Clubhouse for a sudden flood of new users without any invitations.
Of course, Clubhouse's public opening comes at a time when Twitter and Facebook, among others, are already stepping up their game in that same space. Twitter is even starting to test its Ticketed Spaces as a monetization system for both creators and Twitter itself, something that Clubhouse has also launched recently in a very minimal way.