Install or Not : Robird for Twitter

Last month we finally bought Robird for Twitter when it was on sale selling for $1 on the Google Play Store. I personally have heard good things about this twitter app too much that it was irresistible to ignore this deal especially after knowing the fact how terrible the experience is on official Twitter for Android client.

We know, this app has been around from a long time and no wonder we are late reviewing this app but the point here is to give you an option just in case you are looking for a pleasant twitter experience along with push notifications. and there we said it, too soon. Yes this twitter client supports PUSH notifications unlike many other popular third party apps on Android. Google enabled push notifications on Android through a service which is known as ‘Google Cloud Messaging‘. As a consumer we won’t expect any one of you to be even aware of this term because it is meant for developers to make use of with their apps if they want. Be it Plume, Carbon or Falcon, and some more these apps poll data every cycle as set by the user which brings along any notifications in case there are any. Google Cloud Messaging on the other hand uses a different mechanism to push notifications as and when they arrive using Google’s own servers, hence being a service that is completely free. This is how real time notifications are treated on Android and we personally encourage the developers for a better user experience.

On the other hand, Twitter with its restrictions with the API has been continuously killing many third party apps leaving their extremely terrible app in the domain. Why I claiming the official app is terrible because:

• It only supports pic.twitter.com as the only built-in service for images preview

• It can’t remember timeline position even after just viewing an image or a link

• It has got annoying promoted tweets in between your timeline which you can’t turn off

And some more which affects the user experience in a negative manner. The only advantage of the official client is push notifications and I personally feel there is no other reason why I would even install it on my device.

Features

Robird for Twitter from Aaplab LLC has a holo user interface making it perfectly adapted to the operating system. There are plenty of other features which we have listed in an easy readable format.

• It has got PUSH notifications
• Holo UI (with a geeky Dark theme, yay!) with Dark, Black and Light theme options
• Timeline sync
• TweetMarker and TweetLonger support
• In-app image previews from popular image hosts like pic.twitter.com, Instagram etc.
• Backed by Twitter Streaming API
• Integrates with Pebble flawlessly
• Allows muting hashtags or keywords

Install or Not

We have been using it full time as our primary twitter client and undoubtedly we are satisfied with what it offers. This is one of the good twitter clients available on the Play Store that are still alive. The push notifications and the TweetMarker support is personally our to have things in a twitter app along with timeline sync. The fact that it is not much which can’t be provided makes other apps just not perfect no matter how much glitter they have in the user interface. The app is not so big in size takes downloads in 2.4MB but when installed takes about 7.01 MB on disk. The app is back supported from Android 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich up to the latest Android 5.0 Lollipop for the simple reason ‘Holo UI’.

This is one of those twitter apps where you won’t regret spending your money and especially when there’s a deal. The app is currently available for US $1.99 or ₹122.37 to download from the Google Play Store. Always on the list of recommended Twitter apps for Android probably after Fenix which FYI we still have to test but hearing a lot about its magical user experience. Robird for Twitter gets a superb 5/5 score on our rating board.

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UPDATE – After some time, we have been facing issues with image upload and this happens too often. Image attachment fails way too often and this is getting really annoying with time. We have cut down our 5/5 rating to 4/5 just for this.