The guys at X or Twitter hadn’t done a good job over the years when it came down to supporting the Windows platform where apps are concerned. The Twitter app for Windows lacked many features. But just days before Microsoft launched Windows for public consumption, the app was updated to support Windows 11/10, so what is new?
X or Twitter app for Windows 11/10
Let’s dig into what the Twitter app brings to the Windows 10 platform, shall we?
The main listed features of the app are:
- Twitter Live Tiles
- Share photos privately in Direct Messages
- Multiple photo Tweets
- Vine playback
- Animated GIFs.
The first thing users who have been using the previous version of the app will notice is the new design. It is a lot more pleasing to the eyes, and guess what? It will incorporate your Windows accent colors.
Once the app is fired up for the first time, it brings the user to a simple page that asks them to either log-in or sign-up to the Twitter service. The instructions are simple, so just read and follow to either sign-up or log-in.
After getting past the log-in page, users will be greeted with their Twitter timeline. This is where all the interesting things happen; all the crazy statuses posted by the people you follow will show up.
It is possible to retweet an individual’s tweet, share it, favorite it, and even reply to them. Clicking “share” from the “3-dot” menu, and it will open the Charms bar on the right side of the screen. From here, users can share to any installed social media platform, or even to an email address.
On the left side of the Twitter app for Windows lies a list of critical menus. The home button is here for when a user wants to return to the timeline easily. There’s also the notification button; this is where users will view notifications from folks who have favorited one or more of your tweets and send you a message, among other things.
At the bottom of this menu, users will see the “New Tweet” button. Click on this to create and publish a new tweet to all your followers. Make sure tweets are interesting with a few hashtags to multiply the number of people who could end up reading them.
If you like dark themes, you can enable the Dark theme for Twitter App.
How is the performance?
It’s fast, quite fast, than the previous version. Apparently, the team has put more work into this release of the app, but sometimes it has problems loading images and videos, especially videos from Vine. Notifications can also be inconsistent, but that’s not a big deal.
Overall, the Twitter app for Windows is solid, but it still lacks features such as Quoted tweets. GIFs no longer work either, in my case, but we’re guessing a simple update will fix this. However, the Twitter development team is not known for prioritizing Windows, so users might have to wait months.
Search for it in the Windows Store and install it.