Twitter’s official iPhone app

The Twitter app is the official mobile offering for the microblogging service. While it used to lag behind third-party Twitter apps, it’s now arguably the best way to tweet and engage with your followers.

All of Twitter in your hand

When you open the app, there are three screens to swipe between. First is your feed, featuring the tweets of people you follow, as well as the occasional ‘promoted tweet’. There are also tweets suggested by Twitter based on who you follow.

Swipe left to view the Discover tab. Here you can see current trends (which you can set by location), popular tweets, and retweets, and suggestions for users to follow.

Swiping again brings up the Activity tab. This shows you what the people you follow have been up to on Twitter. You can see what tweets people have favorited, for example, and get a feel for what people are talking about when not creating their own tweets.

You can also see your own Twitter profile, messages, and notifications.

When you tweet from the app, as well as sharing links and 140 characters of text, you can now take photos and videos and share them directly in your tweet. Videos can last up to 30 seconds and do not loop, making them much longer (and less loopy) than Vine, the video app which is owned by Twitter. 

On top of that, you can now share tweets that disappear after 24 hours using the new feature called Fleets. These fleets are displayed on top of the users’ timeline or profile. Your followers need to tap the icon for them to see the posts you share using this feature. The contents are in chronological order, and you need to scroll down to see all of them. 

Fleets can either be texts, photos, or videos, which you can customize using various backgrounds and text options. Aside from original content, you can also share tweets as fleets. You only need to click the share icon under a tweet and choose the Share in Fleet option. More so, Twitter also allows anyone to react and reply to Fleets using Direct Messages. Authors can also see who views their fleets by clicking the Seen by button. All these features are very similar to that of Instagram and Snapchat’s Stories, so adjusting to it will be a breeze.

Privacy and help for new users

Twitter supports multiple accounts, which are really easy to set up and switch between. Privacy is now well served – you can connect the service to your phone, and any time you or anyone else tries to log in, they will have to enter a code sent to your device.

New users will get suggestions of people they can follow, which are mainly brands and celebrities. We would warn against this, and instead, try to find friends and people with who you share interests so you can get involved in conversations more easily. Twitter as a service can be daunting for newcomers, and this is not helped by the fact people use it for very different reasons. It takes a little persistence to get into the app and find out why you want it. 
 

The obvious and best choice

It has taken some time to get here, but it’s fair to say this is the best Twitter app around, whether you’re a new or experienced user.

As well as videos, the latest version of Twitter also adds group conversations. This allows you to create group chats between people, but in private.

Changes

• As well as videos, the latest version of Twitter also adds group conversations. This allows you to create group chats between people, but in private.