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Clubhouse, a voice-first social media platform, has returned to school to master a slew of new languages. The company announced the addition of 13 new languages to its app during a press conference in India, making it more accessible to those who wish to see the platform available in their home language. Localizations are baked into the app update for the millions of users who don’t understand English or prefer a local-language alternative.
French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Malayalam, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Tamil, and Telugu are among the 13 languages. It’s an intriguing lineup that notably excludes four of the world’s top ten most-spoken languages (Chinese, Arabic, Bengali and Russian).
The languages will be available first in the Android version of the app, which makes sense. According to Statcounter, Android accounts for more than 96 percent of Indian mobile users, with iOS trailing behind with a market share of roughly 3 percent. This update’s Android-first approach is encouraging for an app that took an embarrassingly long time to release an Android version at all.
“It has truly astounded us that people from so many different nations have able to come together to do this on an app that only supports English,” a Clubhouse PR official said in an email to TechCrunch earlier today. Not exactly.
Aside from the company’s newly discovered fondness for numerous languages, Clubhouse also revealed a brand-new app icon featuring musician, singer, and composer Anirudh Deshmukh (pictured above). Anirudh, who is based in Mumbai, joined Clubhouse at the beginning of the year and by the spring had founded Anirudh, his now 72K-member club where he hosts his nightly show Late Night Jam.
