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How To

How to use Vine for Android

Christopher Park

Christopher Park

  • Updated:

vine headerThe release of Vine for iOS was big news when it was first announced. The ability to record short videos and share them to Vine, Twitter, and Facebook was great to show off your creativity. Now Vine has finally come to Android for users running 4.0 and higher.

While the iOS version released back in February 2013, Android users have been patiently waiting for its official release. Other apps like Cinemagram provided a fix, but now Android users can use the Twitter-owned app.

Sign in or Sign up

Signing into Vine is easy. If you have a Twitter account, you can connect the two services together or you can create an account using an email address. Since I have a Twitter account, I decided to connect through my Twitter account.

Vine Feed and Profile

After you finish logging in, Vine will automatically load the feed. This default feed contains popular Vine users. If you want to search for Twitter or Address book contacts, tap on “Profile” and “Find People” to enable the search options. You can even invite friends using text messages or email if you can’t find them through your address book or Twitter contacts.

Record, edit, and share

Recording is very simple. Tap the camera icon in the upper right and Vine will open the recorder. The interface is very sparse, only showing a window to record the video.

To record, simply hold your finger on the screen with the image. You can’t record if you hold the black space, which is strange. The lack of options in this window is not very intuitive. After a couple seconds you have the option to finish the Vine or you can keep recording for the whole six seconds.

After recording is complete, Vine will render the video for sharing. Once it’s finished rendering, you can add a short message and share to Vine and Twitter.

Vine for Android is very basic

This first release (version 1.0.0) is very sparse. There is a unique zoom function for Android, but Vine didn’t reveal which devices supported it.

Expected updates in the coming weeks include “front-facing camera support, search, mentions, hashtags, and sharing to Facebook.” [Source: Vine Blog]

It’s surprising that these options aren’t available for Android devices considering it’s built to run on Android 4.0 and higher. Right now, Vine is a good app to share videos directly to Vine or Twitter, but without being able to interact with friends easily, the app still feels like a beta.

Christopher Park

Christopher Park

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