I’m a really actice twitter user and I often check twitter from my smartphone. But I’ve realized that there isn’t any decent twitter client for mobile. Not one. Now, of course my criteria for “decent” are a bit high, but I expect it to have the following:
- getting notifications for new retweets (of me) and replies – Seesmic fails on the retweets side, TweetDeck shows only some of these events, and others are skipped. The API is the reason for that, as it recently started behaving strange when giving retweeters information, but the problem was solved in welshare (which still lacks mobile app) by at least showing “Someone has retweeted your message”.
- not getting all new tweets as new notifications. Many do so, which means my phone top bar is always full with a number I don’t care about
- resolving images and showing them inline – from at least twitpic, yfrog and all raw image links.
- to be able to scroll to the top with one click. Tweetdeck and twitter’s own app do that, Seesmic and others doesn’t. Which means I have to manually scroll tons of messages to go to the top.
- being resonably fast – twitter’s own client fails miserably on that point. Sorry, but the client is unusable – you have to wait for more than a munte to get some simple details.
- bonus points – facebook integration. Tweetdeck and Seesmic have that, but for a whole month now tweetdeck doesn’t have the required “read_notifications” permission to get facebook notifications, and Seesmic has a completely separate interface, so you can’t cross-post tweets to facebook.
TweetDeck is the closest to that, but it gets worse and worse after Twitter acquired it (no facebook notifications, not all retweets getting shown). I’m sorry Twitter, but you telling people not to develop twitter clients means you need to have a usable client first. And you don’t. I hope welshare will have its own mobile client at some point, which will address all the above issues.
