Twidroid Sets Some Record Numbers
By: @Hilzfuld
Putting aside the whole Android vs iPhone debate, there is no denying that Android is taking off in popularity thanks to phones like the Droid and Nexus One. For me, one of my biggest complaints about the iPhone platform, and I am not alone here, is the lack of background apps. I mean in all honesty, what kind of heavy mobile user can work efficiently with a maximum of one app running at a time?
Then, I sat down and really thought about this issue and realized that after all is said and done, when using my BlackBerry, I generally do not have more than one app running at a time. It is true that for those occasions when you are running a GPS app, and you want your Twitter to notify you of new replies or DMs, the iPhone might not get the job done, while BlackBerry or Android would.
Then I thought some more about Android and iPhone and realized that there is a tradeoff here. Yes, iPhone cannot run Twitter in the background, but at least the iPhone Twitter app offers a superior experience over the available Android apps. I decided I prefer to have an app like Echofon Pro, which offers a top notch user experience, in combination with push notifications, over Seesmic, which is good, but not as good, but not great.
I needed an app for Android that would give me all the functions I use on Twitter in an easy to use and pleasant on the eyes app. Seesmic was OK, but it wasn’t that app. Twidroid is! I just downloaded Twidroid, which is the most popular Twitter client on Android, and some will say the most popular Twitter app on any mobile platform, with over 400,000 downloads to date.
Apparently, there was a new update released recently, but I was not using the old version, so I cannot talk about that. However, I can say that Twidroid gets the job done, and if one were to choose a mobile platform based solely on the experience provided by Twitter apps (yes, I realize that would be nuts), Twidroid would be very close to the best of the iPhone apps. Add background notifications to that, and Android takes the cake.
Twidroid offers a very simple interface, but when you dig a little deeper, it is all there, and that is the way an app is supposed to be. The main screen has six huge icons (I guess that depends on your phone, but on the Nexus’s mammoth screen, the icons are indeed huge), which give you access to your basic Twitter options. There is the Home, Tweet, Replies, DMs, Search, and Refresh icons. 90% of your time will be spent on this screen.
So what else can this app do? When you press on any tweet in your timeline, Twidroid brings up a long list of options, I dare you to think up a scenario not covered by one of those options. You can reply, show the person’s profile, favorite the tweet, retweet, send DM, copy the tweet, share the tweet on Facebook, email, and some other options, or report the tweet as spam. Like I said, it is all there.
Then you hit the famous Android Options button and you are presented with some seriously advanced features. You can quickly jump to the top of the stream, which on my BlackBerry is done with a keyboard shortcut (long live the QWERTY keyboards), view your profile and completely edit it from within Twidroid, view Twitter trends, adjust the app’s settings, which are as customizable as you can get, and then there are lists.
Like I have written on many occasions, Twitter Lists are what makes the whole experience a lot more manageable. I am not going to get into it again here, but just imagine a person who follows 10,000 people. How can that person really follow all those tweets without splitting the people up into relevant lists? In Twidroid, all the lists you follow are at your fingertips, although, I would have put the user’s lists as opposed to lists the user follows on top of the List screen (wow, that made much more sense in my head).
In any case, Twidroid Pro allows you to fully customize your lists, while the free version just lets you view them the way they are. Other differences between the free and Pro version include multiple accounts, native Bit.ly support, color themes, shake phone to refresh, and some other goodies.
Twidroid is a feature-packed Twitter app that can go head to head with the best of the iPhone Twitter apps. It is not quite as simple to use as Echofon or Tweetie, but it is pretty darn close. It is therefore, no surprise that it is the most downloaded Twitter app across all mobile platforms, and Twidroid Pro is the most downloaded paid app on the Android market.
Our Rating: 4/5
Developer: Twidroid
