Mastodon officially comes to the Play Store

Let’s just ignore all the other clients already in there

Unless you're a social media trendsetter. chasing down alternatives to the behemoths of Internet interactivity, you might not be familiar with Mastodon, the semi-popular microblogging alternative to Twitter first launched in 2016. Whereas Twitter is a centralized ivory tower that can issue bans on a whim and is subject to hostile takeover attempts from eccentric billionaires, Mastodon is built entirely on open-source software and consists of independent, user-managed servers capable of interoperating with each other. Despite being more than half a decade old, Mastodon had yet to release an app for another open-source platform — Android. Thankfully, that's finally changed.

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Due to its open-source nature, this isn't the first app that lets you tap into its network, but it is the first official client released by the Mastodon team (via XDA Developers). Although this social network doesn't have the 200-million-strong user base that Twitter has, the fact that it's open-source means you won't have to worry about a growing plague of ads, and your feed will always remain in chronological order. It comes at a strong time for Mastodon, too. After Elon Musk's initial investment in Twitter, Mastodon saw a spike in new users that's only likely to grow now that it's officially available to the billions of Android users worldwide.

However, this app does miss out on a couple of features included by other third-party clients. While notifications, search, and communities are here, you can't view local or federated timelines. Still, if a missing first-party app has kept you from trying out Mastodon and you want to give it a spin, the app is free on the Play Store and runs on Android 6.0 and above.

Android 13 might stop relentlessly killing your apps