I know it’s desperately uncool for a tech geek to admit this, but I’ve been using the native app exclusively for I guess nearly two years now and don’t miss third party options at all—having previously been a loyal Tweetbot and Twitterific user.
For me the question has ended up reversed: what do the third-party options offer that I would find appealing? The answer for me, as it turns out, is nothing. And the reason is that, after my initial resistance when it was released, I found that Twitter’s algorithmic timeline made the network way more satisfying and way less of a time sink to browse. I used to be a timeline completionist and now I can’t imagine spending that much time on Twitter (or any other network).
I see good tweets from people I follow, I see new stuff from outside my bubble that makes me think, smile, or wonder (discovery is just way better on the native app), and I can interact with all the various features of the platform as intended. If I want to see things chronologically I can (I’m pretty sure that’s still a thing you can toggle) but I honestly haven’t done it since they made the algorithmic timeline an option.
That said, I recognize that some folks who are “power users” really benefit from multiple timelines, filtering, and all those good things. I’m just not one of them, so for me the native app provides a consistent and enjoyable window into the network on iPhone and iPad. Even the much-maligned single column is actually very much a benefit to me. Just because there’s room to stuff more information into an interface, doesn’t mean that’s what I want. The current design is clean and easy to parse.
It’s like with task managers…some people want the tremendous granularity and control of Omnifocus, while others prefer a more streamlined option like Things. I’m firmly in the latter camp on both fronts.
The closest thing to a problem that I have with native Twitter is that I have to see the ads.
Somehow, it doesn’t bother me very much; I suspect we’ve all gotten pretty good at ignoring them. I think the reason ads seem frustrating is that they’re noise to the signal of your followers’ content. But that assumes all your followers’ content is worth seeing and all ads are not, and that’s an assumption I’ve unlearned over the years. The algorithmic timeline does what I consider to be a great job surfacing the actually-worthy tweets from my followers, so really all I’m doing is seeing ads or suggested content instead of uninteresting tweets from my followers.
Despite not being very active, I consider Twitter to be an enjoyable and important platform, and unfortunately ads are how they stay in business…so I don’t mind doing my part to support them. I’d gladly pay them money for an ad-free version, but modern companies are allergic to honest transactions so we do what we can.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
