Ever since Elon Musk took ownership of Twitter, it’s been one chaotic new thing after another. You literally cannot go a day without some stupid new change to the site — whether it’s about checkmarks for verified or Twitter Blue subscriber accounts, how links to other social networks are banned and then reversed, view counts on Tweets, or something else.
In 2008, there was a little app called Tweetie made by Loren Brichter of atebits, which was one of the best third-party Twitter apps on the iPhone at the time. Tweetie is one of the biggest reasons why we even have “pull to refresh” on iOS, as it appeared in that app first and was a game-changer. However, in 2010, Tweetie was acquired by Twitter and turned into the official app, but I hated the changes that were made.
Even as Twitter got worse with algorithmic changes and more ads, I still enjoyed being there because of Tweetbot. Unfortunately, Twitter crippled its third-party developer API many years ago, so some of the newer features, like polls, would never be supported in third-party apps like Tweetbot. Those were the times when I would need to open up the Twitter app or go to the website, but once I did that, I would immediately go back.
Ivory is still only in an alpha state, so it’s missing a lot of features. But the developers are active on Mastodon and are listening to user feedback, as well as polling users for what they should work on next. The most surprising part, though, is how polished Ivory feels already. Personally, it feels like the current version of Tweetbot that I had been using, and have paid money for.
“With the Musk mess…” What mess? Twitter is better than ever IMO.