By Jason Snell

June 14, 2019 12:14 PM PT

Twitterrific 6: My favorite Twitter app just got better

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

The Iconfactory’s Twitterrific is my go-to Twitter client and has been for years. Version 6 of the Twitterrific iOS app launched this week, and I’ve been testing it for months now. While Twitterrific’s approach to Twitter is not for everyone—I always hear from the legion of Tweetbot fans every time I write about Twitter apps—it works perfectly with how I use Twitter and I’d be on Twitter a lot less if it ever went away.

The new version adds a bunch of clever features, some of which I use a lot, some of which will appeal to people who are not me. Videos and GIFs can now play (silently) in timelines, a feature that I immediately turned off. In general, Twitterrific displays images and videos better inline, showing them at their native aspect ratios and including both media and quoted tweets together for the first time.

This version adds support for Giphy, the search engine for animated GIFs, which makes Twitterrific a much better meme-propagation tool. I use Giphy a lot in Slack and it’s fun to be able to pluck an appropriate GIF without ever leaving Twitterrific’s composition window.

Twitterrific’s color scheme has also gotten an overhaul. Rather than offering just dark, light, and pure-black themes, Twitterrific now has three different light themes and five dark themes to choose from. Even more impressive is support for theme customization: You can build your own color themes and drop them in a Twitterrific sub-folder in iCloud Drive and they’ll automatically sync and appear in the app. Color themes are plain-text files in Property List (plist) format. Even better, the files are directly compatible with the theme files you can build in the Mac version of Twitterrific¹.

I was able to export my desktop Twitterrific theme, change its name from “Desktop.plist” to “Desktop.twitterrifictheme”, drag it into the Night folder, and then switch to it on my iPad and iPhone, syncing up my color scheme across all my devices. (Turns out my Mac theme looks terrible on iOS—I’ve got some work to do there.)

This new version ships for free with banner ads and occasional interruptions to request that users support the product. To turn off the ads and interruptions (and support development of the app), you can subscribe to Twitterrific 6 on a monthly or annual basis, or spend a one-time fee to unlock everything for the duration of the lifetime of Twitterific 6. Some past supporters of Twitterrific will get some benefits even without paying for the new version—a page at the Iconfactory’s website has the details.

Twitterrific isn’t for every Twitter user, but I think it’s a dramatic upgrade over the company’s iOS offerings. I wouldn’t use Twitter nearly as much if I had to use the website or Twitter client. That’s why I’m glad that enough people use (and pay for) Twitterrific that the Iconfactory can continue to afford to develop it.

You can get all the details on The Iconfactory’s website.

If you appreciate articles like this one, support us by becoming a Six Colors subscriber. Subscribers get access to an exclusive podcast, members-only stories, and a special community.