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Tweetbot: All Hail the New King of Mobile Twitter Clients

Frederic Lardinois

Apr 13, 2011 — 2 min read

Twitter itself may not be a big fan of new Twitter clients, but that didn’t stop the developers at Tapbots to launch a new iPhone client tonight. It’s a good thing they weren’t dissuaded by Twitter’s anti-developer stance because Tapbots’ Tweetbot (iTunes link) is easily the best mobile Twitter client out there today. It’s even better than Twitter’s own iPhone app and more than worth the $1.99 Tapbots charges for it.

All the Features You Want

Now, with all the Twitter clients for the iPhone out there today, what makes Tweetbot better? It does, of course, feature all the standard functionality you would expect: support for multiple accounts, lists, old-style and new-style retweets, built-in browser, search and virtually every other feature you would expect.

But it also knows some other nifty tricks. By default, for example, a triple-click on a tweet start a reply. A double-click brings up additional context (maps for tweets with geolocation data, for example). A single click open up a menu underneath the tweet for replying, retweeting and adding a tweet to your favorites. That’s not all, though. Swipe to the right and you get to see related tweets. Swipe to the left and you get to see the whole conversation. This sounds a bit complicated, but is actually far more intuitive than it sounds and becomes second nature within minutes.

It’s clear that the Tapbots developers have paid a lot of attention to detail and how people actually use their Twitter clients on a mobile phone. Tapbots, for example, has decided to treat lists with the respect they deserve and allows you, as Shawn Blanc also notes, to set them as your main timeline.

The design is minimalist but highly functional. You get lots of options (support for Instapaper and Read It later, 9 URL shorteners and 6 image hosts, for example), yet it works perfectly fine out of the box.

I should note that Tweetbot does not feature push notifications. Boxcar, however, already supports Tweetbot, so you won’t have to miss this feature either.

Verdict

Twitter may not like this, but Tweetbot is currently, in my opinion, the best mobile Twitter client out there. Unless you really don’t have $1.99 to spare, I recommend you give it a try (iTunes link).

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