Discord Revamp Android App So Updates Can Appear Simultaneously On IOS And Desktop

Discord overhauled its android app. (photo: twitter @discord)

JAKARTA - Discord is revamping its Android app in the coming weeks so that new features and updates arrive alongside iOS and desktop. If you're an Android Discord user, you're probably used to seeing new features not appear for months after they were announced on iOS. For example the Server Profile feature was available on iOS long before Android.

“Historically, work on implementing new Android features has often been delayed until the desktop and iOS have been completed, and resulted in some features being first rolled out on one platform before finally arriving on another,” the Discord product team explained in a blog post, quoted by The Verge.

Discord is turning to React Native for its Android app, which will allow the company to roll out new features on each platform simultaneously. It also means that Discord's design on Android will be more similar to what you're used to seeing on a desktop or even iOS.

React Native is widely used in many popular mobile apps, including Instagram, Microsoft Outlook, Shopify, Tesla, Pinterest, and many more. Discord has been using React Native for its iOS apps since it was open sourced by Meta in 2015, allowing the company to build its iOS apps from the core of its React apps.

The move to React Native on Android will also make Discord's features and design more consistent across Android, iOS, and desktop. While the Android Discord app will still retain some custom adjustments, things like font size will be synced between Android and iOS.

“Android users will also enjoy the benefits of a faster app update release cycle,” explains Discord. “React Native allows us to streamline and consolidate our processes, which helps our engineers work more efficiently and pushes updates more frequently, especially now that teams won't be spending as much time maintaining different codebases for different devices.”

Discord has already started rolling out its updated Android app, so Android users should start to benefit from this underlying codebase change over the coming weeks. That means we'll never see the "coming to Android soon" message for the Discord feature in the future.