After making a blink and miss appearance at a recent Samsung event, Twitter's tablet-optimised Android app has been officially released. However, the app is exclusive to Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1-2014 edition for now. Twitter has informed that it will be extended to other Android tablets by the end of the year.
While Twitter's iOS app, which is a universal one, is optimised for the iPad, the app's Android version till date offers the same interface on both tablets and phones.
According to a
blog post by Twitter, the tablet-optimised app's landscape view offers Tweets, conversations, Trends, and accounts to follow among other features.
The tweets can be expanded to see photos, videos and article previews on the right side of the screen by tapping. On further tapping, users can see photos, play videos or read links from the web in fullscreen mode.
The new Twitter tablet-optimised app for Android supports the Samsung tab's Multi-screen view, letting users run Twitter and another app at the same time.
The Twitter Android app for the Galaxy Note 10.1-2014 also comes with a widget that displays tweets, photos, and videos in addition to country-specific breaking news, music, sports and photos. The app even offers the ability to favourite or retweet right from the widget. This feature also appears to be limited to the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1-2014 edition.
Another Galaxy Note 10.1-2014 feature is the ability to doodle with the S Pen stylus that comes with the tablet.
The app ecosystem on Android tablets has lagged behind iOS, with most Android apps built primarily for smartphones. It's strange that a mainstream service like Twitter chose to go exclusive (at least for some time) with just one Android tablet model, thereby fragmenting its Android tablet apps. It's not the first time that this has happened, as apps like Flipboard also arrived first on Samsung's Android devices.