Been on Twitter today? The new mobile app has split opinions and personally I’m on the negative. I’m not sure what problems this new app design solves. Less tweets are visible per page and screens that were a button press away are now behind menus or obscured behind swiping gestures that are not explicitly documented.
To me, it’s a mess. On the surface it looks fine, but its design has come at the cost of easy use and many of the finer details have been neglected. This is a tiny example but see below:
This has brought to mind something I’ve been thinking recently with a lot of apps. You simply must act like an Apple product on the Apple platform to be taken seriously. Not with wholesale-copied design but in polish and detail.
The Xbox Live app which launched in iOS this week as well looks fantastic — and it looks nothing like an iOS app! The whole UI is in the Windows Phone 7 / Windows 8 ‘Metro’ style and it looks fantastic. Very polished, runs very smoothly.
On the other hand lesser apps have rough edges, which stand out like a sore thumb on a device which in hardware and software is engineered to be close-as-possible to perfection. Compromise won’t cut it in such a competitive and talented market.
So if you’re going to play in the same sandpit as Apple and those who think like them, you need to step up to their level. The flaws are more obvious on an (almost) flawless device and shipping an App with some rough edges like the new Twitter today will always result in some blowback.
I bought Tweetbot today, wonder how their sales went in the last 12 hours?