DeviceGuru

Roma De, from Netflix’s product team, has announced that the company has released an Android Netflix app, which he says eventually will support a “large majority” of Android phones. Five devices, four from HTC and one from Samsung, are initially supported.

Here’s De’s announcement, which was posted on Netflix’s blog…

“We are making the free app available for download from Android Market. The Market download will initially be available only on select phones that currently have the requisite playback support. We expect to quickly add to the number of phones that can download from Android Market as we work with ecosystem partners to expand playback support.”

“The Android platform is gaining rapid adoption in the mobile world and presents a great opportunity to reach more of our members. Because the platform has evolved so rapidly, there are some significant challenges associated with developing a streaming video application for this ecosystem. One of these challenges is the lack of standard streaming playback features that the Netflix application can use to gain broad penetration across all available Android phones. In the absence of standardization, we have to test each individual handset and launch only on those that can support playback. We are aggressively qualifying phones and look forward to expanding the list of phones on which the Netflix app will be supported. We anticipate that many of these technical challenges will be resolved in the coming months and that we will be able to provide a Netflix application that will work on a large majority of Android phones.”

As of the date of this post, the Netflix Android app currently supports the following smartphones:

• HTC Incredible with Android 2.2
• HTC Nexus One with Android 2.2, 2.3
• HTC Evo 4G with Android 2.2
• HTC G2 with Android 2.2
• Samsung Nexus S with Android 2.3.

Further details on supported phones is available from Netflix’s website, here. De’s blog post is here.