X Rebuilt Its Android App from Scratch After Years of Neglect
X has rebuilt its neglected Android app from the ground up, a year-long project its product chief calls one of the biggest in the platform’s history. The promise is faster, smoother, more reliable. However, the reply thread is already full of bug reports.
July 21, 2026 – 3:39 pm
Android users have long dealt with a rougher version of X’s app. After nearly a year of work, the company has stopped patching the old app and rebuilt it from scratch. The new version ships as a normal update through the Play Store, X said. It offers faster loading times, smoother scrolling, and more dependable notifications.
Why X Decided to Tear It Down
The old app had earned a bad reputation for good reason. For years, the Android experience lagged behind iOS, and at one point last year, it struggled even to load posts when users opened links, as Digital Trends notes. That’s an awkward failure for an app built around opening posts.
X’s product head, Nikita Bier, called the rewrite one of the largest engineering projects in the platform’s history. The team rebuilt the foundation rather than keep patching the old code.
Focus on Speed
The point is not just smoother scrolling. Bier states that the new base allows X to build and ship features much faster. This is significant as Elon Musk pushes his "everything app" plan.
Current State: Rough Edges and Pending Features
It’s not perfect; spaces, the live-audio feature, still lack support, and performance on older phones needs work. Additional promises include a video editor, video reactions, cashtags, and custom timelines, but no release dates have been provided.
Users have shared their concerns: images take time to load, videos stall, notification icons are bunched together, a two-factor login loop persists after a phishing wave targeted X’s login alerts, foldable support is missing, and the dark mode isn’t available. Some even inquired about the programming language used for the rewrite.
Back to Basics
None of this is groundbreaking; a fast, reliable social app is the baseline in 2026, not a headline feature. Rival apps also have their own reliability stumbles, and everyone is racing to ship the same everyday features. Still, for Android users who witnessed the old X struggle with basic tasks, improved scrolling counts as progress.
XChat, its encrypted messenger, reached Android in June. The platform is finally acknowledging its most neglected audience with some attention.
By Darius Popa, Technology enthusiast and intern at The Next Web, contributing to research-backed content and investigating new technologies and global events.