Twitter has been messing about with their APIs recently. They seem to be slowly removing more and more features to stop third party app developers adding new and useful features to their apps.
One prime example of such a thing is push notification. Only the official Twitter Android app deliver push notifications off mentions, no third party app are allowed access to this great feature. But I do not want to use the official Twitter app because it is awful. I want to use one of the many third party apps that are available instead like Plume, Tweakdeck or Tweet Lanes. So how do I go about finding out if I have been mentioned?
You have several choices. Most apps have a polling feature where the app refreshes your timeline, mentions and direct messages every ten or fifteen minutes. This would work but it would eat up loads more battery in doing this and you also miss out on some Tweets as various apps can’t remember timeline position properly.
The next thing you could do is enable Email notifications. Twitter have a service where their servers send you an email when you get mentioned, messaged or followed. This sounds ideal, shame it doesn’t work properly though. When I had this enabled I would get 3 or 4 emails a day for an average of 30 to 40 mentions.
You could just install the official app alongside your other app and run both. Again battery life may take a hit here.
Lastly you can enable SMS notifications for Twitter. In the olden days this is how Twitter used to work. Tweetification uses this service to notify you off any mentions. You don’t get a message you just get a notification which when tapped takes you to your choice of Twitter app.
If you are a Twitter addict it is pretty useful. Here are some screenshots of the app at work.
Below is the Play Store description. Plus some pointers for how to get the app working. I will be setting this up today and my fingers are crossed that the SMS from Twitter are more reliable than the emails from them. So if you are a Twitter addict and you like to keep up with your mentions give this app a go, it’s free and shouldn’t take much time at all to setup.
Description
## This app needs SMS permissions to intercept Twitter SMS notifications ##Tweetification is a small app that intercepts a SMS notification message from Twitter and displays it as a system notification.** You need to setup Twitter SMS notification for this app to work **You can customize which application launches when touched.3rd party Twitter applications are not being granted push notification access from Twitter at the moment. Poll notifications waste your battery.
This app does not need to run, so does not waste your battery. It simply intercepts the Twitter SMS message as it arrives
Play Store Link – Tweetification
I’ve been using SMS to get notifications for ages. Instant notifications and doesn’t consumer battery like push does. Best of both worlds!
Why isn’t this more popular!