Twitter app offline actually pretty good
2024-05-23 14:02:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
A lot of people complain about Twitter these days, and some of their points are valid. Personally I find the worst thing is that the advertizers are kind of weird. My timeline is always full of scantilly clad woman with large breasts selling one thing or another. It's kind of gross. But this post isn't about that. What this post is about is offline, and my experience with the Twitter app offline is actually rather good.
The first thing is that the app actually opens while offline, and displays a timeline with posts. A lot of other social media apps don't even do that. Instead they just show an emtpy app shell stuck trying to load content from their servers. What's more the posts on the timeline are clickable, and expand to the full post if they were shortened in the main feed. So you can actually scroll through your timeline even when offline and get a reasonable view of what's going on. Or at least what was going on last time you were online.
Now it's not perfect. The post pages don't show any replies, and any media like video, audio or image files don't showup. So there are gaps, which is a little annoying, but understandable for large files. It still would be better, I think, if at least some text replies were stored locally. Oh you can also get post urls and even re-post, I guess the app syncs next time you are online.
I think offline is a really underated feature, and though some improvements would be good, the Twitter app gets a lot of it right. It's much better than other social media apps that don't even bother.
If you make a social media app, consider making offline a priority, it's a real sign that you respect, value and care about users and their experience.