Here’s a little insight into startup history that may not be widely known outside of the tech companies themselves: The first versions of popular Android apps like Twitter were developed by Google itself. This revelation came via a new podcast with former Twitter senior director of product management Sara Beykpour, now co-founder of AI news startup Particle.
In a podcast hosted by Lightspeed partner Michael Mignano, Beykpour recalls her role in Twitter’s history. She explains how she started at Twitter in 2009, initially as a tool engineer, when the company only had around 75 employees. Beykpour later transitioned to mobile work at Twitter around the time other third-party apps on other platforms, such as BlackBerry and iOS, were becoming increasingly popular. One of them, Loren Brichter’s Tweetie, was even adopted by Twitter to form the basis of its first official iOS app.
Beykpour said Twitter’s Android app comes from Google.
The Twitter client for Android is “a demo app that Google created and made available to us,” she said in the podcast. “They did that with all the popular social apps back then: Foursquare…Twitter…They all looked the same back then because Google wrote them all.”
Mignano interjected: “Wait, so go back; Explain that. So Google wanted companies to adopt Android so they could build apps for you?”
“Yes, exactly,” Beykpour replied.
Twitter then took over the Android app created by Google and continued to develop it. Beykpour is the second Android engineer at the company, she said.
In fact, Google had detailed its work on the Android Twitter client in a 2010 blog post, but much of the press coverage at the time did not associate the app with Google’s work, making it a forgotten part of Internet history. In Google’s post, the company explains how it implemented early Android best practices into the Twitter app. Beykpour told TechCrunch that the post’s author, Virgil Dobyanschi, was the lead software engineer.
“If we had questions, we should ask him,” she remembers.
Beykpour also told other stories about the early days of Twitter. For example, she worked on Twitter’s video app Vine (after returning to Twitter from a stint at Secret) and was under pressure to launch Vine on Android before Instagram launched its video product. She met that deadline by launching Vine about two weeks before Instagram Video, she said.
The latter had a “significant” impact on Vine’s numbers and led to the popular app’s demise, according to Beykpour.
“That was the day the writing was on the wall,” she said, although it took years before Vine finally closed.
At Twitter, Beykpour led the shutdown of the Vine product – an app that is still so popular that even new Twitter/X owner Elon Musk keeps talking about reintroducing it. But Beykpour believes Twitter made the right decision with Vine since the app wasn’t growing and was expensive to run. She acknowledges that others may see it differently, and may argue that Vine didn’t have enough resources or the support of leadership. Ultimately, however, the closure was due to Vine’s impact on Twitter’s bottom line.
Beykpour also shared an interesting anecdote about working on Periscope. She joined the startup when it was acquired by Twitter and after she left Secret. She recalls having to officially rejoin Twitter under a fake name to keep the acquisition secret for a while.
She also spoke on Twitter about the difficulty of getting resources to develop products and features for power users like journalists.
“Twitter really struggled to define its user,” she said, because it used “a lot of traditional OKRs and metrics.” But the fact is that “only a fraction of people tweet” and “of the fraction of people who tweet, “part of it is responsible for the content that everyone actually wants to see,” which Beykpour said was difficult to measure.
Now at Particle, her experience building Twitter informs the strategy for the AI news app, which aims to connect people to the news that interests them about what’s happening around them.
“Particle is a reimagining of the way you consume your daily news,” Beykpour says in the podcast. The aim of the app is to provide a multi-perspective view of news while providing access to high-quality journalism. The startup is looking for another way to monetize reports beyond ads, subscriptions or micropayments. However, the details of how Particle will accomplish this are still being discussed. The startup is currently negotiating with potential publishing partners about how they can be compensated for their work.