• Twitter Updates Their Android App — To Be Almost Exactly Like Their iPhone App

    Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010

    MG Siegler is a general partner at CrunchFund and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. His focus is on Apple. Prior to TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in... → Learn More

    Twitter has just released an update to their Android app into the Market. So what’s new? Well, it’s faster for one thing. But perhaps more significantly, it now looks and functions much like their popular iPhone app.

    Specifically, the Pull-to-Refresh and Swipe-to-Reveal features that have been standard on the iPhone version since it was still known as “Tweetie” have made their way to the Android version. There is also a new Tweets detail page that yes, looks exactly like the iPhone version.

    Twitter promises that this latest version should be much faster. The company says they’re trying a new way of drawing timelines that should make scrolling smoother.

    The company previously worked with the Android team at Google to ship the original version of the app. It was good, but not as good as Twitter for iPhone. Now they’ve taken the thing entirely in-house we’ve confirmed (it has been in-house since version 1.0.3 — this is version 1.0.5). And yes, it’s substantially better.

    Of course, it’s still not quite iPhone-good. Pull-to-Refresh, for example, fails to bounce as you might expect on the iPhone. And Swipe-to-Reveal feels a little stale. But that’s most likely a lack of Android polish, not Twitter polish.

    Oh, and you can finally quote a Tweet (on top of retweet it).

    Company: Twitter
    Website: twitter.com
    Launch Date: March 21, 2006
    Funding: $1.16B

    Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post updates 140 characters long. Twitter “is a real-time information network that connects [users] to the latest stories, ideas, opinions, and news.” The service can be accessed through a variety of methods, including Twitter’s website; text messaging; instant messaging; and third-party desktop, mobile, and web applications. Twitter is currently available in...

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    Product: Android
    Website: code.google.com
    Company Google

    Android is a software platform for mobile devices based on the Linux operating system and developed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance. It allows developers to write managed code in Java that utilizes Google-developed software libraries, but does not support programs developed in native code. The unveiling of the Android platform on 5 November 2007 was announced with the founding of the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of 34 hardware, software and telecom companies devoted to advancing open standards...

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