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Aviary is a brand-new twitter app for iOS14. A twitter app in 2020? Why? Didn’t twitter kill off the apps when they limited their API access? Doesn’t twitter want you to use their app?
Aviary, still in beta until iOS14 (still in beta, too) releases, is a twitter app for iPhone, iPad, and macOS Big Sur. It will be released when iOS 14 and Big Sur are released out of beta.
The number of twitter apps that serve iPad well are vanishingly few. The official twitter app does, but badly, showing trends and news on the screen when you might not want to see it.
Twitter itself hasn’t made this easy – they’ve tried to push users to their own apps, and limit app developer’s access to their APIs in the past. Developing a twitter app in 2020 is taking a risk that twitter may change the rules again.
The iPhone twitter app keeps changing how they display your timeline. What if there was an app that respected how you wanted to view your timeline, not how twitter wanted you to view it?
Aviary fixes a lot of this. Here’s why you want it:
- custom media viewer for images, which expands from and collapses to the timeline image, with a tap to see retweets, likes, and the accompanying tweet text
- sharing tweet content and links, but also sharing the tweet as an image
- collapsible side bar sections so you can sort
- images have context menus for quick actions like Copy and Share
- Profiles have a nice clean look
- Support for lists
- Support for trending and reply views
- Quote tweets
- Video viewing
- alternate app icons (something Apollo, the Reddit app has made popular)
- filters, so that you can filter content but tap to see it anyway, if you wish (similar to Mastodon’s approach)
- iOS 14 widget support
- A browser preference, so you can specify a browser to open links in
- Multiple account support
- Saved searches, custom text sizing…
- really too many things to list.
Basically, as powerful as other twitter apps are, it really feels like Aviary is one to have in 2020. It’s both featureful and easy to approach.
If you live on twitter, addicted to the rush of posting and getting likes, Aviary looks to be the perfect app for 2020. I am impressed with how far it’s come, and can’t wait to have it for iPad and macOS.
