Twitter streamlines mobile apps with inline images, favorites, retweets

Twitter is all about communication at a glance: its inherent character limitations keep messages short, and hashtags can simplify things further still into a few bullet points. Despite all this airy simplicity, the mobile app itself has been sort of tap-heavy. Today Twitter announces efforts to do something about that, cramming more information and controls into the main timeline view.

It used to be that if you wanted to see an attached image, reply to a tweet, favorite it, or retweet, you first had to tap through to an individual screen for that message. Instead, updates to the Twitter apps for both Android and iOS will now show images and Vine clips integrated with the primary timeline, and buttons for replies and the like are right there for you to hit.

On one hand, that all sounds pretty convenient, but we can see more than a few downsides: it’s going to make your timeline a whole lot less dense, which is a problem depending on how active the accounts you follow are, and it threatens to make it much easier to accidentally hit favorite or another action button when attempting to just scroll. We’ve also got a feeling that pulling down all this imagery is going to spell significantly higher bandwidth consumption.

The Twitter website will see these inline changes, too, but there’s no word on them coming to Windows Phone.

Source: Twitter
Via: the::unwired