Vine, the popular quick-video platform, has an Android update that has us scratching our heads. While the twitter-centric service is full of six second clips meant to be a living GIF of sorts, it also left out one very important Android demographic. Until now, those on Gingerbread couldn’t take advantage of Vine. That’s changed — sort of.


Vine is now available for Gingerbread users, though it’s only for viewing videos, not uploading them. While hardware limitations are likely to blame for the omission, it leaves us wondering. We won’t argue that those devices still on Gingerbread are behind the curve, but we find it hard to think there wasn’t a workaround that could have been seen. Maybe allow for WiFi uploads only?

That’s also not the extent of the issues with Vine. Their Play Store rating is currently at 3.6, with a variety of issues being noted. The main agrevaton seems to stem from video quality, or the app only grabbing audio. Between those, and some force-close and log-in issues, Vine needs a bit of focus.

They recently announced vanity URLs, but that’s not going to solve these issues. The inability to upload for a full one-fourth of Android users is a tough proposition, and something that we’d like to see worked out. If Android 4.4 really can save the mid-range day, then those problems start to become less important. That day seems to be a long way off for Gingerbread users, though. The ability to view Vines is handy, but not enough.

1 COMMENT

  1. vine is a wait on android. i not running gingerbread software im actually running 4.4.2 on my nexus device. the developers for vine only want to focus on apple products not android. now i know for sure that there are hardware leaps and bounds the developers have to over come. that isnt the excuse for a shitty experience all together. i stopped using vine becuz developers dont care about users experience unless it an apple user lets be real here.

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