Airbnb Debuts Android App, Easy To Discover And Book A Place To Stay

Airbnb, a startup that allows people to rent out their rooms, apartments, or homes, launched their Android app today. Of course, you can also rent out entire countries (seriously), though were not sure how many people took up that offer.

There’s been an app for the iPhone for a while now, but as with a lot of services, you typically see them come to iOS first and Android later, if even at all. Also, Airbnb has a new version of it’s mobile website up as well.

Instead of simply porting the iPhone app over to Android, they decided to put a little more work into it than that and had it redesigned. Of course, it cost more to do that, but is nice to see them put more effort into app development than that. And often when you port an application over to another platform, there can be numerous bugs to work out.

Last year, the company went through a good amount of negative publicity after someone rented out their apartment and was completely vandalized by the people who stayed there. They learned quite a bit from that and now every rental comes with a $50,000 guarantee and they also boosted their support staff and made their customer support line open 24/7.

The Airbnb iPhone app has been downloaded 500,000 times. Their hosts serve all over the World, 19,000 cities and towns in 192 different countries to be exact. Because of the large Android user base, they anticipate they’ll double their mobile user base because of the Android app.

Would you ever rent your apartment, room, house, etc., on Airbnb or would you ever book a place to stay through there?