Discord completely revamped its Android app so you don't have to wait for new features

Discord is overhauling its Android app in the coming weeks to bring new features and updates to iOS and desktop as well. If you're a Discord Android user, you're probably accustomed to seeing new features that don't show up on iOS until months after they were announced, and we recently noticed that the Server Profiles feature was available on iOS before Android. Was.

"Historically, work on Android implementations of new features has often been delayed until completion for desktop and iOS, resulting in some features launching first on one platform, which eventually migrate to another," said the Discord product team. Explains in blog post.

Discord is switching to React Native for its Android app, which will allow the company to roll out new features on every platform simultaneously. This also means that the design of Discord on Android will be similar to that used for viewing on 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 opened by Meta in 2015, allowing the company to build its iOS app from the core of its React apps.

The arrival of React Native to Android will make Discord's features and design more consistent across Android, iOS and desktop. While the Discord Android app will still keep some specific customization, things like font size will be aligned 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 push updates out more frequently, especially now that teams are different across different tools. It won't take long to keep."

Discord has already started rolling out its updated Android app, so Android users should start to feel the benefits of this underlying codebase change in the coming weeks. And hopefully, this should mean we'll never see another "coming soon to Android" message for Discord features in the future.