Walkie-talkie app launches on Android

Roger, the walkie-talkie style voice messaging app created by a team of ex-Spotify engineers, has landed on Android.

The service is quite simple; it allows users to send voice messages to each other. While that’s a feature available in almost every messaging app, Roger puts voice messages front and centre of its beautifully-designed app, which also includes information snippets — like the weather or time of day — for the location of the person you are talking to.

The team behind the app created it to humanize the dominant mode of communication on mobile—

which for most people is text — and encourage more voice conversations.

“While we have never been as connected as we are today, we rarely talk to each other anymore. There are many apps with microphones, but few encourage actual conversations,” Roger co-founder Ricardo Vice Santos told TechCrunch.

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The service debuted on iOS late last year and now, just over a month after the start-up raised a $1 million seed round, it has become available for devices running the Google-owned operating system.

The Roger team isn’t revealing specific details about its user numbers right now, other than that it has users in over 120 countries worldwide, but the team did share some interesting feedback that it received from one segment of users: those who are visually impaired. (For example, two users took to Audiobook, an audio-based social network to share reviews.)

“We were quite surprised how many blind people became users,” Vice Santos said. “[From feedback with users] we’ve learned more about how blind and disabled people use technology. There are 300 million blind people in the world and [the difficulties of communicating via a smartphone] doesn’t surface enough.”

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