by Jason Snell
Twitter clients in 2014
If you read only one exhaustive survey of the current state of affairs in iOS Twitter clients, let it be Federico Viticci’s.
It’s fascinating to see just how little is left in this once vibrant field. Twitter used to be a service that was famously a design playground for mobile app developers. For most users it is now, like Facebook, a service with one official interaction point.
But as Viticci says, this isn’t necessarily bad:
I see what Twitter has become, and I like it. The Twitter experience I have in third-party clients isn’t the full Twitter anymore. As much as I wanted to deny it, I needed to face the facts and accept that the rest of the world sees Twitter through a different lens than our iOS community. Twitterrific and Tweetbot still offer plenty of features that I love such as timeline sync, better support for external image URLs, and share sheets, but, when compared to the new Twitter that I can have in the official app, the trade-off isn’t worth it anymore for me.
I don’t love the official Twitter client for Mac, but I use it because it’s just got more stuff in it. On iOS, I still resist, and use Twitterrific. But I’m resigned to the fact that one day I will have to stop resisting.