Tech darling Twilio cozies up to Android with new client

Twilio has finally released its Android client with a new native software development kit that will allow Android developers to add VoIP features to any Android app.

The startup’s iOS client has been around since February, and today, Android developers are basically getting the same set of tools — tools that allow you to easily make voice calls a feature, if not necessarily the main event, of your application. You can use the Twilio client on any existing Android app, or you can use it to build a new app from scratch.

(And yes — we can smell the Twilio Android/mobile hackathon coming already. These days, you can’t throw a rock in San Francisco on a weekend and not hit a hackathon, and Twilio’s last hackathon went pretty well. Stay tuned for more on that this fall, when the startup will host its second conference.)

Features for the Android version of the client include voice calling on any Android device with a data connection, tap-to-call capabilities, analytics, and feedback from voice calls.

Twilio first introduced this concept (voice features with minimal code) almost one year ago for web developers. At that time, Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson told VentureBeat, “The existing telephony network is a big dumb audiopipe. … Skype is obviously amazing and transformed the way people interact, but Skype is only one client. We want to make that available for millions of developers.”

Since then, the company has been earning rave reviews from developers and has leveraged its hacker street cred into $17 million from Silicon Valley’s finest VCs.