A while ago I covered an app which helped third party Android Twitter app users kind of get push notifications for their accounts. The app is called Tweetification and it’s recently been updated to work with the latest version of the Twitter SMS API.
It’s all a bit fiddly to describe but I’ll try my best. Basically if you use Twitter on any platform you have a choice. You either use the official Twitter app which has no restrictions on how many tweets you send per minute or how ever many times you hit refresh or however many other people are also using the app either. But if you do use the app you get push notifications almost as soon as someone mentions you, you also have to put up with their vision of how an app should function, I.E. Clunky.
Some people out there don’t want to use the official apps, some people don’t want to be told how to use the world’s biggest social network, they want to use one of the many alternative apps with enhanced functionality and restrictions. Such as Plume, Tweetings or the ill fated Falcon. The main problem these people face with these apps is the lack of push notifications, done in a non restricted manner anyway. As some apps use a fast pull option which hunts for mentions fairly frequently and often attracts the attention of the API police meaning you have to wait for a while before your app will function again.
Tweetification is an app that goes someway to circumventing this push notification issue. By using an ancient technology, SMS. Yes I said SMS, Twitter in the olden days was web based and to Tweet something when you were out and about was done via SMS. You even got notifications in return via SMS, the developer behind Tweetification has taken this API from Twitter and adapted it to work with his app.
So this is how it works, you basically need an app like Plume set up as you like, for me it’s on manual refresh. You then install Tweetification, you then turn on SMS notifications with Twitter. You then encourage people to mention you, you then start receiving notifications from Twitter which are handled with Tweetification and when you tap on them your chosen Twitter app loads up. Once set up it’s really handy, the only slight problem is the way Android 4.4 grants access to SMS for third party apps, so you either manually delete them from your messaging app or you somehow block them instead.
You can find info on how to set up SMS notifications here at the Twitter website.
You can install Tweetification from the link below.
Google Play Store Link – Tweetification