There’s an app for just about every product and service with a web presence. You probably use a few to check in on your social media, email, and financial accounts. The official apps from social media services are generally OK but it seems Twitter apps fall short for a lot of people. They aren't particularly intuitive and new releases are buggy. Crashing, freezing, and incomplete loading have become more frequent. On a practical side, the official apps don’t do much to help you see what you want, when you want. Guess what? There are better apps created by developers to make tweeting a better and easier user experience.
Mobile Twitter Apps
Twitter has basic mobile apps for iPhone and Android. They are OK at best. Twitter seems a little defensive about them and only permits developers to list their products on iTunes and Google Play for the first 100,000 downloads. This can make it difficult to find the most popular (and presumably, better-performing) apps. Here are a few you can still get:
- Tweetbot, by Tapbots, has been updated for iOS7, works on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. It goes way beyond the standard Twitter app to give you more control. You’ll get your Twitter drafts and Lists organized, customize your tabs, downloads tweets in the background so you aren’t waiting around for them, and mute certain tweeters and hashtags. As with any good mobile app, you can customize your screen to your heart’s delight. $5 from iTunes.
- Twitterrific 5, from the Iconfactory, is a Tweetbot competitor recently updated to decrease the loading time in older devices. It developed many of the features seen and tweaked in Tweetbot, perhaps with a few more steps involved in customization. One review of its initial launch in 2012 called it the “Star Trek of iOS.” Free on iTunes.
- Phandroid recommends Talon from Klinker Apps for Android users. It’s a particularly well-designed product with tons of themes to choose from, a night mode, auto refresh, in-app browsing, in-line reply—basically, all the features the Klinker Brothers’ fans told them they liked. $1.99 from Google Play.
Desktop/Laptop Apps To Manage Twitter
There are also apps that let you manage your Twitter account in great detail, for those who tweet a lot or use Twitter for direct communications.
- Twilert helps you monitor companies, brands, and hashtags you identify to follow. You create an alert for a brand or company name, filtered by keywords and location. Alerts come via email as often as you like, by the minute, hour, day, or week. You can try Twilert for free for 15 days. Prices start at $9/month for up to five people.
- Ever find yourself searching your Twitter feed for a certain item you need to reference now? It’s a frustrating waste of time. But now there’s SnapBird, which searches your tweets or someone else’s tweets based on words you feed it. Cost: $0.
Do you have a Twitter app you just love and want to share with us?