\n<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s a tidbit of startup history that may not be widely known outside of the tech firms themselves: The first versions of popular Android apps, like Twitter, were built by Google itself. That revelation came about via a new podcast<\/a> with Twitter\u2019s former senior director of product management, Sara Beykpour, now the co-founder of the AI news startup Particle.<\/p>\n In a podcast hosted by Lightspeed partner Michael Mignano, Beykpour reminisces about her role in Twitter\u2019s history. She explains how she began working at Twitter in 2009, initially as a tools engineer, when the company employed only around 75 people. Later, Beykpour moved to work on mobile at Twitter around the time when other third-party apps were growing in popularity on other platforms, like BlackBerry and iOS. One of those, Loren Brichter\u2019s Tweetie<\/a>, was even acquired by Twitter to form the basis of its first official iOS app.<\/p>\n As for Twitter\u2019s Android app, that came from Google, Beykpour said.<\/p>\n The Twitter for Android client<\/a> was \u201ca demo app that Google had created and gave to us,\u201d she said on the podcast. \u201cThey did that with all the popular social apps at the time: Foursquare \u2026 Twitter \u2026 they all looked the same in those early days because Google wrote them all.\u201d<\/p>\n Mignano interjected, \u201cWait, so back up; explain this. So Google wanted companies to adopt Android, so they build you apps?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes, exactly,\u201d Beykpour responded. <\/p>\n Twitter then took the Android app that Google had built and continued to develop it. Beykpour was the second Android engineer at the company, she said. <\/p>\n In fact, Google had detailed its work on the Android Twitter client in a 2010 blog post<\/a>, but much of the press coverage<\/a> at the time<\/a> didn\u2019t credit the app to Google\u2019s work, making this a forgotten bit of internet history. In Google\u2019s post, the company explains how they implemented early Android best practices within the Twitter app. Beykpour told TechCrunch that the post\u2019s author, Virgil Dobjanschi, was the main software engineer. <\/p>\n \u201cIf we had questions, we were supposed to ask him,\u201d she recalls. <\/p>\n Beykpour shared other stories about Twitter\u2019s early days, too. For instance, she worked on Twitter\u2019s video app, Vine, (after returning to Twitter from a stint at Secret<\/a>), and had been under pressure to launch Vine on Android before Instagram launched its video product. She met that deadline by launching Vine roughly two weeks before Instagram Video, she said. <\/p>\n The latter \u201csignificantly\u201d affected Vine\u2019s numbers, and, in Beykpour\u2019s opinion, was what led to the popular app\u2019s demise.<\/p>\n \u201cThat was the day the writing was on the wall,\u201d she said, even though it took years to eventually shut Vine down.<\/p>\n At Twitter, Beykpour had led the shutdown of Vine\u2019s product \u2014 an app still so well-liked that even new Twitter\/X owner Elon Musk keeps<\/a> teasing<\/a> bringing it back. But Beykpour thinks Twitter made the right decision with Vine, noting the app wasn\u2019t growing and was expensive to run. She admits that others may see it differently, perhaps arguing that Vine was under-resourced or didn\u2019t have leadership\u2019s backing. But ultimately, the closure came down to Vine\u2019s impact on Twitter\u2019s bottom line.<\/p>\n Beykpour also shared an interesting anecdote about working on Periscope. She joined the startup right as it was acquired by Twitter<\/a>, and after leaving Secret. She remembers having to officially rejoin Twitter under a fake name to keep the acquisition under wraps for a time. <\/p>\n At Twitter, she also talked about the difficulty in getting resources to develop products and features for power users, like journalists.<\/p>\n \u201cTwitter really struggled to define its user,\u201d she said, because it \u201cused a lot of traditional OKRs and metrics.\u201d But the fact was that \u201conly a fraction of people tweet,\u201d and \u201cof the fraction of the people that are tweeting, a subset of those are responsible for the content that everyone actually wants to see,\u201d was something that Beykpour says was difficult to measure. <\/p>\n