Chirp for Twitter

Description of App

Chirp for Twitter is the best way to use Twitter on your Apple Watch for free.

You can endlessly scroll through your timeline, catch up on trending, and keep up with your mentions. You can also read and reply to all of your direct messages!

Use lists? Chirp can do that do. Need to search for something (or someone) specific? Yep, Chirp does that as well.

Not only can you browse your timeline, but it's also incredibly feature packed! With videos, images, mentions, hashtags, and so much more, you'll be able to get through any boring meeting or school assembly with Chirp!

Version

2.0

Free or Paid

Free

watchOS Version

6.1

Accessibility Comments

This app works great with VoiceOver. As of version 2, every tweet now has custom actions, so swiping down on a tweet lets you quickly reply, like, retweet or view the author's profile. Tapping on a tweet will additionally let you follow any links to read articles or watch videos attached to a tweet as well as view the entire conversation.

Sometimes if you flick right from a tweet VoiceOver may just give you the error sound and not move to the next one, this seems to happen if a tweet contains a lot of images making it take up more than 1 screen. If this happens you can just use a 2-finger flick up to scroll the tweet the rest of the way and you should be able to continue navigating.

Usability

Fully Accessible

Other Comments

Hats off to Will for this update. When I initially tried the app out it had a lot of unlabeled buttons, and going from tweet to tweet was slow. A few days and Testflight builds later the app is a joy to use, and things have only gotten even better from here. The current versions of the app are even faster and let you compose tweets using the Flicktype keyboard which is much faster and more suddle than dictating them.

I would recommend Chirp to anyone who wants access to Twitter at any time, not just when notifications come in. This app will not be affected by the upcoming Twitter API changes as it does not use the streaming API. You will also still need the official Twitter app if you want to receive notifications on your watch.

Developer's Twitter Username

@WillRBishop

Recommendations

4 people have recommended this app

Most recently recommended by Piotr Machacz 4 years 11 months ago

Options

Comments

By TheBlindDragon on Friday, December 21, 2018 - 16:57

How do I get the beta? I don’t know if I’m getting an Apple Watch for Christmas but that will be awesome to help out with testing.

By Piotr Machacz on Saturday, December 21, 2019 - 16:57

Version 2 of Chirp just dropped, with a rather massive numhber of changes. Before I paste the official what's new, one thing that's not mentioned in it is that for VoiceOver users, much like most iOS Twitter apps, Chirp now takes full advantage of actions. So, when you want to interact with a tweet you can swipe down to access options like reply, like and retweet though you'll still need to double tap on a tweet to follow any links. With that out of the way here's what else is new:

Version 2.0
Hey everyone! I don’t use the ‘2.0’ version number lightly, and I'm so glad I waited this long to use it! Here is a list of all of the new features you can find in Chirp 2.0! Please note, some features below required watchOS 6.

- The timeline has been completely rewritten for watchOS 6. It’s now truly faster, more efficient, and more reliable than ever. It now has true endless scrolling too!
- Username Colours! Head in to Settings on your iPhone or Apple Watch running watchOS 6 (or later) to change the color of your username! Better yet, everyone else using Chirp will be able to see it too! This feature is $2 (or $1 for Chirp Pro users) – The decision to make it paid was not taken lightly, but ultimately it required a lot of backend work, which I believe justifies the $2 (or $1) upgrade.
- Mentions, Likes, Trending, Hashtags, Lists and Search now all use the more efficient and feature-packed timeline!
- An improved video player! Tired of videos endlessly loading, or just freezing up? I’ve written a completely new video player to be far more robust, reliable, and best of all, fast!
- With username colors, there’s now a ‘Rainbow’ option. But during Pride month (June), this color will be free for everyone.
- Dark mode is now available in the iOS app
- Sign up in seconds! Instead of opening Twitter.com and logging in, if the Twitter app is installed on your iPhone, you can now authenticate with that.
- Faster load times
- Images now show in DMs
- Tweet now also show in DMs
- FlickType has been updated to be way easier to use. No more dots as you type, no more painful corrections, just type as you would on your phone (Check the Apple Watch screenshots for a quick preview)!
- Image grids! Up to four images per tweet can now be previewed on your timeline. Previously it was limited to just one, but now you can see all four in a snazzy grid.
- Want to send a user a direct message directly from their profile? Now you can! Just force touch and hit the message button!
- More messages! Chirp can now load up to three times as many messages as before (from 50 up to 150)!
- You can now delete tweets you’ve authored by force-touching and choosing ‘Delete Tweet’.

The less interesting changes:
- Added a troubleshooting guide to the Chirp setup page on both iOS and watchOS.
- When a user buys Chirp Pro, they’ll now be prompted on their Apple Watch with instructions on how to tweet.
- Added an ‘Acknowledgements’ page to the iOS settings page. Head to Settings > Chirp > Acknowledgements to see it!
- When logging out of Chirp on your iPhone, the currently logged in username will be shown.
- The search page now prompts you to enter a search term if you tap ‘Search People’ or ‘Search Tweets’ before entering one. This was a common point of confusion, so I’m glad I’ve cleared it up.
- Chirp now uses a verified logo in place of a blue username

New languages! I'm so happy to say that Chirp is now available in:
- Chinese (Simplified)
- Danish (Denmark)
- Dutch
- Finnish
- German
- Hungarian
- Italian
- Japanese
- Norwegian Bokmål
- Portuguese (Brazil)
- Portuguese (Portugal)
- Russian 
- Spanish (Latin America)

It also wouldn’t be an update without some bug fixes!

Fixed:
- If a tweet quoted a tweet which itself was a quote, a large blank space would appear.
- Some images would appear squished or would just otherwise have the incorrect aspect ratio
- Improved reliability of setup.
- Some users may have shown as verified even if they weren’t
- Some typos here and there
- Sometimes ‘Tipping Jar’ price-labels could be truncated, this should be less of an issue now.

Thank you all for your continued support! Don't forget you can always contact me via email or Twitter to let me know what you want to see in the next update!

Ps. Chirp now collects some strictly anonymous user data. I use this data to better prioritise my development time to ensure the features you use most are reliable. You can easily opt out of this in Chirp Settings on your Apple Watch.

By Bingo Little on Saturday, December 21, 2019 - 16:57

First time I opted to tweet with the Flicktype keyboard it downloaded and installed to the watch as expected. After that, it simply won't work. When I choose to tweet using the Flicktype keyboard as far as I can tell the keyboard doesn't come up. I'm just presented with a 'done' button. A firm press brings up a menu with three items in it—invisible, clear and something else I can't catch. Tapping the done button reveals the standard Chirp men- including post, cancel, etc. with the text 'what do you want to say?' as the body of the tweet. I have no idea how to make the Flicktype keyboard work. I've contacted the developer and I'm sure he'll reply as he's brilliant at that, but I wondered if anyone else can help?

By Piotr Machacz on Saturday, December 21, 2019 - 16:57

Yeah, you're right, looks like something broke. He recently updated to a supposedly much better version of the Flicktype SDK, perhaps it broke accessibility somehow? Admitedly I haven't tried Flicktype in this app for a while because I mainly use it for browsing, but this feature definitely used to work fine just like Flicktype on iOS

By Bingo Little on Saturday, December 21, 2019 - 16:57

That's really unfortunate. I use BSI on my iPhone so the only reason I would have for using Flicktype would be with Chirp and pyh other apps on the watch. Primarily with Chirp, for sure. I hope it gets fixed soon.