Tweetbot

 

I've thought about getting a secondary app to access Twitter for years. If you use the Twitter app, the reasons for switching are probably obvious. Your timeline becomes cluttered with retweets, promoted tweets (i.e. ads), etc. But the most annoying thing of all is the Twitter timeline jump. The app will go through periods of time when it works fine. However, there are periods of time where it can't seem to keep a linear timeline. It typically either jumps several tweets or sometimes hours forward on your timeline, requiring constant backward scrolling. Or even worse, occasionally it will jump on your timeline to an alternate Twitter reality, where the tweets you were seeing are completely gone, replaced by new Tweets as if the previous ones never existed.

When I went to the app store there were fewer 3rd party apps available than I expected. Tweetbot was one I had heard of before and got decent reviews, so I downloaded it. Accessing my Twitter account was as easy as logging in, and before I knew it I was viewing a clean, streamlined version of my timeline. I've been using the app for around two weeks and there have been no timeline jumps, no promoted tweets, and no clutter. The tweets are formatted differently, taking up more of the horizontal screen space requiring less scrolling. The overall experience is cleaner and improved.

I fully expected to pay for this app, but this far I haven't paid anything. I have mixed emotions about paying to access something I can access for free, but I use Twitter often enough that an improved experience is probably worth the few dollars. I may be in a free trial period, but I've been using it for a few weeks and it hasn't asked me to pay yet. Most of the Twitter features are locked, like responding, liking, direct messages, etc. If you pay for the subscription those features are unlocked. At this point, I'm thinking you can use it for free but sacrifice those features. I'm fine with this as I am not a Twitter power user and tend to use it more for consumption of information versus sharing my opinion or interacting with others. Plus I can always switch to the native Twitter app to access those features if wanted. With all of this being said, I will likely continue to use Tweetbot as my main Twitter app as the experience is quite a bit better. This will especially be true if I don't have to pay anything for the app.