New Mashable Android App Predicts What's Going Viral

We're proud to announce that we're launching a new Mashable app for Android in a partnership with Samsung. The app will premiere exclusively for select Samsung Galaxy devices, including the Galaxy S4, Galaxy S III, Galaxy Note II and Galaxy Tab 3 devices, before full public release next week.

Above All, We Listened to You

We know you like our responsive, adaptive website (thanks again for the massive amount of emails and tweets!), so we've implemented that design strategy within the app. It's a beautiful design that responsively adapts to your device's size, from a phone to a mini to an oversized tablet, so you can be assured the app will look great on whatever you're carrying.

And we've listened to what you told us were some of your favorite features. For instance, when you finish reading an article, the homepage is dynamically stitched in below the article. You don't need to keep clicking on the navigation to get around the app — it just knows where you'll want to go next and opens up a path for you. We know you expect this from us, and that's what we aimed to deliver.

Predicting What's Going Viral

We also listened to all of you who emailed, IMed, commented, pug-bombed via Hubot on Hipchat, and otherwise messaged us about adding our homegrown viral prediction technology, which we call Mashable Velocity (first debuted in Mashable Velocity for Google Glass), into the Android app. So we did that.

When our Mashable Velocity algorithm predicts a story is about to go viral, we'll send an Android notification to all the folks who have installed the app. But we have to warn you, it's pretty addicting. Just promise us that you'll read the one story you're notified about, and then you'll actually get back to work.

Backgrounder: What Is Mashable Velocity?

Back in December, when we launched the new Mashable, we released a site that was built by our own hands on top of a homegrown algorithm called Velocity. Velocity scours the social web, collecting lots and lots of data around how people engage with published articles. It then pulls all of that data back to Mashable, dumps it into our own predictive engine, and forecasts which articles are about to go viral.

We dogfood Velocity: Mashable's homepage and section pages are driven by it. Velocity decides the stories to promote and in which areas of the page to display them (this process is overseen by a human editor, of course, but Velocity greatly reduces the amount of work that a human has to do).

In much the same way that Velocity helps Mashable's human editors know what's hot on the site, our new Mashable Android app (and our Mashable Velocity for Google Glass app) alert you just before a Mashable story goes viral. With it — and an Android device or a pair of Google Glasses — you know what everyone is talking about on the social web, before they're talking about it.

Thanks Again

We love apps and we love mobile web. But above all, when you're happy, we're happy. So keep giving us your feedback and suggestions on what you want to see next. We hope this shows that we're not only listening, but here at Mashable we've taken it a few levels higher: You are the ones driving our roadmap. Thanks for that, and we hope you enjoy this new Mashable app for Android.