We’ve been taking some flak from Android users for the lack of an Android app. I thought it might be helpful to share our thinking on this.

First, we love you, Android users! I sense a feeling from those writing to us that they feel left out or overlooked or excluded. It never feels good to feel excluded.

We have an app in the Apple App Store. But for Android the App is a web app. Ethan who leads our tech efforts did it this way because Android’s implementation of web stuff is way better than Apple’s. We don’t love the Apple App Store. Their practices are sort of monopolistic. They have totally arbitrary rules which have been a total pain. Example? They told us that the App had to be usable without an account (although there are plenty of examples of other apps that got approved in account-only form). There are other things we’ve had to deal with too that are even more ridiculous (if more technical).

One of the issues with the Android implementation is that for it to work really well you want to add it to your home screen. It took us a bit to figure this out, but many of you are operating in Incognito Mode. And when you do that you can’t add the app to the home screen. Just a funny quirk we didn’t anticipate.

The current sign-up flow should be much more clear and helps you set everything up to work best with your platform.

So no Android app in the near-term pipeline, but it’s because of some really great stuff the Android platform has to offer, not because we don’t care! As of today, the Android web experience for the Clover App is just as good, if not better, than our iOS experience. We support Google Pay, rich native notifications, offline menu browsing, and more! You’re not missing anything.