UPDATED 08:00 EDT / JUNE 22 2012

How Does Flipboard for Android Compare to iPad Version?

Flipboard, a social network aggregation that curates content from social media and other websites to present them in a magazine-like format to users, just released their app for Android smartphones.

Flipboard is an app famous with iOS users.  It originally launched for the iPad but is now available for iPhones as well.  You can say that this is yet another iOS app that crossed over the Android planes.  I’m not sure though if Flipboarders will be as harsh as Instagram users were when the app launched for the Android platform.

“They would love for us to be iOS exclusive from now until the end of time,” said Evan Doll, a co-founder of Flipboard who previously worked at Apple as an iPhone engineer. “But we’re trying to reach as big an audience as we can.”

So what does the Android version have that the iOS version lacks?

Flipboard for Android

The app brings the experience of reading everything you’re interested about in a single place, a n experience loved by iOS users and now by Android users.  The app was just released for Android today, but it has already been downloaded almost 2,000 times and with great user reviews.

The app features the same thing as the iOS version, streamlining 12 of your favorite social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, YouTube, Google Reader, LinkedIn, Flickr, 500px, Sina Weibo and Renren.  The Android launch also came with Google+ and YouTube integration which will also be available for iOS when they update their app.

What Android users are still missing, however, is the tablet experience.  Flipboard was smart to team up with Samsung for an initial, exclusive launch on the Galaxy S III, and the resulting leak that made Flipboard’s APK available to all Android users only boosted anticipation for an official Android launch.  But Flipboard, first designed for Apple’s popular tablet with a poignant magazine style, has been restricted to the smaller screens of Android smartphones for now.  There’s no word on whether or not Flipboard will release an Android tablet version any time soon, but if they do you can bet it will be worth the wait.  One of the primary reasons Flipboard took so long to get to the Android platform was because of the varied device screen sizes that made it difficult for Flipboard to maintain its famous aesthetics.

New editions

Aside from crossing to the Android yard, they’ve also added support for five new countries such as Germany, Italy, Korea, Netherlands and Spain.  It comes with a fully translated interface and tons of reading recommendations curated by local editors.   All you need to do is tap on the red ribbon, tap “This Week”, then select your Content Guide Edition.


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