What better time to announce your support for emerging mobile platforms than during the Mobile World Conference? Twitter on Tuesday announced support for the upcoming Firefox OS and several hours later updated the Windows Phone app to properly support Windows Phone 8 and give the app a new design which matches the company’s latest look across all the other platforms.
The new version for Windows Phone sports the same Home, Connect, and Discover tabs that Twitter users should now be familiar with and features the new compose icon as well as a search button located at the bottom of the app. Users will be able to edit their profile, upload profile and header images, use multiple accounts, activate toast notifications for mentions, direct messages, new follows, retweets, and favorites.
While the Windows Phone version works with WP 7, on WP 8 the app lets you pin specific accounts, lists, and searches on the screen with update support for Live Tile and the lock screen. Unfortunately the tab placement across the top is so large, it limits views to no more than four tweets at a time with the smallest font size, reducing the advantage of having a high resolution screen on the larger Windows Phone devices.
Twitter’s decision to design the Windows Phone app in such a way is strange considering that the mobile site can accommodate more tweets and is far more compact, although it has no support for lists, Live Tile, lock screen updates, nor does it support toast notifications, for obvious reasons.
An upside to the app however, is that by allowing Windows Phone users to pin lists as separate tiles, Twitter returns the relevance of having lists in the first place, at least on Windows Phone. The list functionality is something that was scaled back after Jack Dorsey returned Twitter as its Executive Chairman in 2011. On other platforms though, lists are still effectively hidden.
In an earlier blog post, Twitter announced support for Firefox OS, committing a native app for Mozilla’s mobile operating system. An interesting decision albeit surely an easy one considering that apps for Firefox OS are based on web technologies. Interesting because having a Firefox app seems to fly in the face Mozilla’s stance on how the web works but that’s a discussion for another article.
Twitter for Firefox OS will support Firefox’s Web Activities which will allow people to send photos to Twitter from any app that supports this feature as well. Based on the screenshot provided on the post, the app will look identical to the mobile web version.
