All new Twitter app

Yesterday, Twitter released the all new version of their official Twitter App. The new version features a “Quick Bar” that shows the current trending topics. In addition to the trending topics, it shows one “promoted” trending topic. This feature is not received very well. Many users (and I’m one of them) hate it. It’s not only that I do not care for the trending topics. It’s the obtrusive way the Quick Bar is presented.

This obtrusive way reminded me of the point in time when I installed my first ad-blocker. Back then, many web pages started to display banners. I accepted these banners for a long time because these banners allowed the web page creators to earn some money. Then they overdid it. Too many banners, flashing banners, annoying banners. I started to hate ads. Nowadays, I do not use any browser without an installed ad-blocker (Firefox, Safari). In magazines, I mostly ignore the right page, where most of the ads are. Before I fully switched to podcasts, I changed the channel when there were commercials in the radio, even if I did not listen actively! And even in podcasts, the only advertising I accept is “sponsored by” or product reviews of sponsored products. I already unsubscribed from one or two podcasts because of the commercials they used were annoying. Maybe I became kind of extreme here.

Do I want them to do all of that for free? No! I’m a user of Flattr that allows me to donate little amounts of money to pages that I like. I’m willing to buy an in-app-purchase to get rid of ads if I really use an app. Something like that. But please do not annoy me, your customer, with ads (or anything else). If you think you have to annoy, provide a way to get rid of this annoyance that is better than me ignoring your product!

After all, I really liked the previous version of the official Twitter app. I wanted to get it back. Luckily, I did the update on my iPhone, not on the computer. When I noticed that I do not want to use the new version, all I had to do was to delete the app on my phone, then sync the phone and after that reinstall the app from iTunes. There were two drawbacks, though:

• I lost my Twitter settings in the app. Not a big problem but I had to set it up a second time.

• I must not update the app by accident in the future. No longer using “Update all” might become annoying.

Of course I could have restored from a backup but the trouble searching it was not worth it, considered there is only a very limited set of settings in the Twitter app. I do hope that Twitter will release a version that allows one to remove the Quick Bar, soon.

Also read my next article about why we need version management in iTunes.