Next door is the private social network for people to interact with people in their local communities, today next-door is launching its first ever native app for the Android operating system, and here to give us a demo is Nirav Tolia, the founder, and CEO of Nextdoor, thank you for joining me. Thank you for having me, Joshy, and just to get started, you have Android right here, we're going to get into the demo, but can you tell me why Nextdoor has been doing this big mobile push? I feel like since February you raised that 21 million dollars, and since then it's been mobile, mobile, Mobile, why is it so important?
We're sort of an interesting local company and that we didn't start with a mobile app, we started with a web app and there was a good reason for that, we needed to have our neighbors, actually draw neighborhood boundaries, and that was something that made a lot more sense on a large screen. Once we actually got some good penetration of neighborhoods, we said, look, it's time to actually take this to where all the people are, and th35at's mobile devices, and so we launched our iPhone app on May 23rd, which was about three months ago, and we're very excited today to launch Android as well, great, and here it is.
Here's the Android phone, can you show me what the experience is like with Nextdoor? Sure, and if you are a Nextdoor member, it will seem very familiar, but just easier, and on your phone and as it comes up, this is the altar Hill neighborhood, which is actually a fictional neighborhood that we demo, because as you probably remember all Nextdoor neighborhoods are private, so we can't show those publicly, but you go in and it looks like lots of different social networks, there's a main newsfeed, where you see the content, there is a way to actually go through the different categories, so if you quickly want to see, for example, crime and safety information, you can click there in the feed and you will see crime and safety information, come up, if you want to read an extended story, you just click on it here, it's actually easy to interact with your neighbors, you can thank through one click there, you can actually reply by going all the way down to the bottom or pushing here, and you'll see actually the reply message come up, and it's just as easy to use as the website, it's just as easy to use as the iPhone app, it's really just available on Android. That's really important, because as we know Android is the fastest-growing operating system, and we want to make sure that everyone who wants to use Nextdoor has easy accessibility to the information.
And so with the launch of this, how many more people are going to have access to it? Do you have data on which of your existing users are iPhone users versus Android owners? We do, we have a little bit of data on that, because we can see where people open emails using mobile devices, but more importantly after we launch this app, 91 percent of the US smartphone owners will be able to access Nextdoor using their mobile device, so the idea here is when you're talking about neighbors, that are discussing crime and safety tips, when they're talking about urgent alerts around natural disasters, you want to make sure that that information is available to everyone, whether they have a desktop computer, a laptop, and iPhone or an Android device, and so this is sort of the last piece in the puzzle for us, we have the web experience, we have the iPhone app, it was really important for us to get Android as well, because we want to make sure that every neighbor who wants to interact with their neighbors on Nextdoor can easily do so.
And I understand this, and we talked about this before, but can you explain why Android came a couple months here after iPhone? What are the unique challenges to developing an Android app? There weren't many unique challenges, but what we saw is our existing user base, six or seven months ago was primarily using IOS devices, whether that's iPads or whether they were accessing the website on mobile Safari, and so we typically make decisions based on where our members are, and so we saw more of our members using IOS devices, and we went there first, the little challenge that you're talking about is there is some fragmentation in the Android Marketplace, and so we needed to create a version that was compatible with as many versions of Android as possible, and this first version of our Android app is compatible with 96% of current Android applications, so we're excited about that good news.
And the last question here, what is next for Nextdoor? We're very excited because in mid-October, we will celebrate our two year anniversary of launching nationally, and we should actually exceed 20,000 neighborhoods by that, and we think there are about a hundred and fifty thousand neighborhoods in the country, so once you reach 20,000 with the kind of penetration that we have in major cities, we're making really good progress and we're looking forward to every neighborhood country using Nextdoor good stuff in Europe.
Thank you for stopping by showing us Nextdoor and Android and keep us posted, thank you for having me.