As the hype cools, Clubhouse is no longer invite-only & anyone can sign up

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Clubhouse app
Clubhouse app (Image credit: Bryan M. Wolfe / iMore)

What you need to know

  • Clubhouse is no longer invite-only and everyone can get in on the action.
  • Clubhouse invites users to "bounce around the hallways of the Internet and meet incredible people."

After around a year of being in beta, Clubhouse is now officially live for all. There is no invite system and anyone can sign up to be part of the platform right now.

Announced via a blog post, the move means that everyone can now sign up for a Clubhouse account and start listening — and talking — at will. That's a marked change from the previous invite-only system that was designed to help make sure Clubhouse's servers didn't fall over. The system has generally worked as well, but now it's time to fling the doors open and let everyone in.

We're thrilled to share that Clubhouse is now out of beta, open to everyone, and ready to begin its next chapter. This means we have removed our waitlist system so that anyone can join. If you have a club, you can post your link far and wide. If you are a creator with an audience, you can bring them all on. If you're hosting a public event, anyone can attend. You can bring close friends, classmates, family members, coworkers, and anyone else you like — on iOS or Android.

The move comes as the likes of Twitter and Spotify have already 'borrowed' the idea of Clubhouse and turned it into features of their own, with Spotify even building a whole new app around it. Whether this move is too late for Clubhouse remains to be seen, but interest in it has been waning amid the increased competition from some of the biggest companies around.

All of this aside, Clubhouse is still one of the best iPhone apps for talking to groups of people in a way that wasn't really possible before its arrival. The company has also committed to shipping "big new updates every 1-2 weeks," something that Twitter and Spotify might struggle to match.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.