Oops – Microsoft’s Xbox team caught tweeting from an Android device

We laugh when celebrities promoting companies do so using a rival product — remember Oprah sending a tweet praising Microsoft’s Surface from her iPad, or BlackBerry’s one-time Creative Director Alicia Keys tweeting from an iPhone? — but what about when companies themselves do it?

The team behind Microsoft’s Xbox Twitter account has some explaining to do after tweeting updates from an Android device, as eagle-eyed Twitter user Romit Mehta spotted. (Thanks to Tweetbot, one of the few apps that shows which client a tweet is sent from.)

The @Xbox account’s most recent tweets at the time of writing come from a combination of Twitter for Android, social media management service Sprinklr, and the Vine app. That suggests that some are being sent from an employee’s personal phone.

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Xbox isn’t only the Microsoft team that has prioritized other devices ahead of Windows Phone. Earlier this week, Microsoft’s Bing search team launched its Rewards program on mobile — it’s initially available on iOS and Android, and “coming soon” to Windows Phone, Microsoft’s own platform.

It’s one thing for staff to use other companies’ devices for personal use, but another issue entirely when it is for public-facing company properties.

Windows Phone could do with all the support it can muster. It accounted for a mere three percent of smartphone shipments last year, according Canalysys, and has a sub-five percent share of smartphone sales in the US.

Headline image via Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images, screenshot via @theromit