At last! Twitter gets a Windows app update

One of the reasons Windows 8 went down like a burger van at a Vegan convention was because popular apps were seldom updated. However, the launch of Windows 10 has prompted some of the big names to renew their interest in the Windows App Store, most notably Twitter.

The official Twitter app for Windows 8 was, frankly, a shambles. It was a crash-prone, feature-lite client that failed to deliver real-time updates, meaning you were often left waiting five minutes or more for your feed to refresh, which isn’t at all handy when you’re trying to sneakily keep up with the Test Match at work. Worse still, while Twitter apps for iOS and Android were regularly updated with new features, the Windows app was left to wither. 

Now, it seems Microsoft has managed to convince Twitter to upgrade the app for Windows 10 – and it’s a vast improvement. The timeline updates in real-time, so you’re not constantly waiting for new tweets to appear – and there’s a Refresh button in the bottom corner if the feed gets stuck for some reason. 

The app has now activated its Live Tile, so tweet previews appear on your Start Screen menu. Photos, Vines and animated GIFs now appear in the timeline, and you can also upload multiple photos into a single tweet, as well as upload photos to Direct Messages.

One disappointment is that Twitter appears to have removed the facility to share links, photos etc from other Windows Store apps. This was fundamentally broken in the previous Twitter app, almost always resulting in an error message, but instead of fixing it, the option to share to Twitter now appears to have been removed.

Nevertheless, the new Twitter app for Windows 10 is a vast improvement on what went before. Let’s just hope they bother to maintain it this time.