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

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."

The app is no longer a beta.

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.