Twitter, Inc. has finally announced that its popular live streaming app Periscope will be available on Android devices today.

It’s not clear from reports exactly when today, or whether it will be released globally or just within the United States; at the time of writing the app was not available in the Google Play store (at least in Asia), and no Android link is available from the Periscope website.

The move from Twitter to finally release an Android app comes on the heels of competitor Meerkat releasing a public beta back in April.

Periscope has been highly successful for Twitter since its debut on iOS-only devices and is said to have had 1 million streams within its first 10 days. As we’ve reported previously Twitter has been urging celebrities, in particular, to switch from Meerkat to Periscope.

There are said to be some differences between the iOS and Android apps, including a start button to begin a stream being a big red button middle of the bottom of the screen, in keeping with Google/ Android user interface design schematics.

Further, the app supports Android KitKat 4.4 and later which is said to have made development “significantly easier” since it surfaces more of the hardware encoding and video APIs that the iOS version does.

Typical Silicon Valley snobbery

The disgraceful thing with this supposed release (we presume it will actually appear later today) is that it was too bloody long in coming.

Seventy-eight percent of the world is said to be using Android phones (you can give or take on that given your stats source, but everyone agrees it’s 70+ percent) and yet the collective, inbred clustf**k of Apple iPhone users in Silicon Valley and San Francisco can’t see the forest from the trees.

In what sane development market do you ignore the largest possible market for your product?

Meerkat doesn’t get off either, but at least they did beat Periscope to market on Android.

As it is both services have the potential to be sued out of existence for persistent copyright abuse by its users anyway, barring some sort of magical solution by both companies in the year ahead.

It’s just not good enough Silicon Valley that you continue to ignore Android users.