Tag: Twitter

Android Community

X (Twitter) will soon let you pin hashtags to organize posts within Communities

X logo on smartphone stock photo (aka Twitter) (1)

Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority

TL;DR

  • X, formerly known as Twitter, is working on a new feature that will allow group admins to pin hashtags within a Community.
  • This would presumably help organize the community better by creating different timelines of posts.
  • Currently, hashtags within communities are auto-generated from popularly used hashtags.

X, formerly known as Twitter, is slowly working its way to become an “everything app.” In its journey towards this goal, the platform and its apps have been getting a lot of new features, like audio and video calls, that were recently added to the platform. There are a few features that are a work-in-progress and haven’t been rolled out yet, like the Enhanced Discovery perk for X Premium users. The platform is now working on a new feature to help drive the adoption of its “Community” social groups.

We have located new strings in the latest version of X for Android, highlighting the ability to pin hashtags within Communities.

Code

<string name="add_hashtag">Add hashtag</string>
<string name="community_pinned_hashtags">Pinned Hashtags</string>
<string name="pin_hashtags_description">"Pin hashtags to organize your community's posts on separate timelines"</string>
<string name="type_a_hashtag_here">Type a hashtag here</string>
<string name="duplicate_hashtag_error">This hashtag already exists</string>
<string name="hashtag_limit_reached">No more than %1$d hashtags allowed</string>
<string name="invalid_hashtag_special_char">Hashtags should not have spaces or special characters</string>

According to these strings, hashtags will soon be used to organize posts within a Community. Presumably, group admins will be able to identify key hashtags and pin them to the top of the community. Users will then be able to click on the hashtag and see all relevant tagged posts within the community.

Communities already have a hashtag feature, and these hashtags are already pinned to the top. But these pinned hashtags are auto-populated from the currently active posts within the community and are displayed from most popular to least popular.

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Android Community

40 leading Android developers to follow on Twitter

Android continues to lead the world in mobile market share. The open source operating system has a community of developers as vast and diverse as the ecosystem itself, so it wasn’t hard to find dedicated, engaged Android developers sharing helpful news, tutorials, and ideas on Twitter.

This list has a lot of Google developer experts and mobile Java experts who are sure to keep you up to date on skills and tools once you start following them. Here are the 40 Android experts you should follow.

Chiu-Ki Chan

@chiuki

After 6-plus years as a software engineer at Google and more than a year developing at two startups, Chiu-Ki Chan now runs her own mobile development company, Square Island. Chan is a public speaker, a Pluralsight course author, and teaches in Caster.io videos. She is also the co-creator of Android Dialogs and runs the 360|AnDev conference.

Jake Wharton

@JakeWharton

Jake Wharton was there at the beginning of Android, coding for the platform before he even knew that it would dominate the mobile landscape and end Blackberry’s dominance. He’s been an Android engineer at Square for more than four years, and he’s a major contributor to RxJava (reactive extensions for the JVM) and RxAndroid (RxJava bindings for Android). 

Donn Felker

@donnfelker

Donn Felker is a co-host of the Fragmented Podcast and the founder of Caster IO—a bite-sized video lessons site for Android development (like RailsCasts for Android). He’s also  the author of Android Application Development for Dummies, Android Tablet Application Development for Dummies, and he contributed a chapter to Android Developer Tools.

Kaushik Gopal

@kaushikgopal

Kaushik Gopal is the other co-host of Fragmented Podcast. He currently works as a senior Android engineer at Instacart, and maintains an Android NTP time library, open

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Android Apps

Twitter app icon updated to ‘X’? Here’s how to revert back

Here’s the crux of the article in video form:

New updates are being added at the bottom of this story…….

Original story (published on July 28, 2023) follows:

Twitter has completely changed recently and the most noticeable change is the new logo, which is a simple ‘X’.

Some people love the new logo, saying it’s a more modern and minimalist design while the majority hate it, saying it’s boring and lacks personality.

Twitter app icon updated to ‘X’ on Android

Now, Twitter has rolled out an updated app icon, denoted as ‘X,’ for its Android users. However, a substantial number of Twitter Android users expressed their disapproval of the new updated icon ‘X’ (1,2,3,4,5,6,7).

Twitter app icon updated to X
Source

The complaints are primarily centered around the icon being less appealing, characterized as ‘ugly’. For others it doesn’t resonates with the Twitter brand they were accustomed to.

Negative feedback on social media platforms, including Twitter itself, is swift and vocal. Users vented their frustrations, voicing their dissatisfaction and concerns about the new design.

Some users even threatened to uninstall the app if they were forced to adopt the new icon, signaling the emotional attachment that some have towards old logo.

Wake up and trying to figure out when I downloaded a app named “X” lol what the heck is this? 😵‍💫 Had me pressing the icon like 🫣
Source

I woke up this morning, looked at my phone, saw the new “X” app icon and for a moment I wondered where I got malware on my phone. Are we all just going to continue calling this twitter?
Source

The implementation also seems to be a bit inconsistent. Some users are getting the icon but the app is still called Twitter, while

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Advertising & Marketing

Meta’s Threads could lure ads from Twitter but it’s early days, analysts say

July 24 (Reuters) – Threads, Meta Platform’s (META.O) broadside to Twitter, is seen by some advertisers as less contentious and more predictable than Elon Musk’s platform, and analysts say it could lure away marketing budgets – eventually.

Launched on July 5, Threads became the fastest-growing social media platform to hit 100 million users, the apparent first serious threat to the dominant microblogging Twitter app. On Sunday, Musk said Twitter would rebrand and change its logo to an X. read more

Threads saw a drop-off in downloads and engagement in the week following its buzzy debut, according to research firm Sensor Tower, and for now is not open to ads.

But analysts have forecast lofty ad spending targets – with the caveat that they depend on whether users stick on.

If the app manages to retain users, Threads could achieve $5 billion in annual ad revenue, equaling what Twitter earned in 2021, Bernstein said in a note on July 18.

“The unprecedented adoption of … Threads now also offers Meta some material greenshoots to get excited about,” they said, while cautioning that it was still early days and other upstarts like Clubhouse had fizzled out.

Morningstar analysts said on July 11 that Threads could add between $2 billion and $3 billion to Meta’s revenue every year between 2024 and 2027. Evercore ISI analysts estimated on July 9 that Threads could generate $8 billion in annual revenue by 2025, a small portion of the $156 billion revenue analysts expect for Meta that year, according to Refinitiv.

In the hope that Threads will flourish – thanks to Meta’s deep pockets and experience with successfully running Instagram and Facebook – and expectation it will introduce advertising eventually, some brands may already be considering how much money to set aside for future marketing campaigns on

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Android Apps

As Twitter flounders, Mastodon refreshes its official app for Android users

While Twitter is busy limiting the number of readable tweets and breaking its TweetDeck app, open source Twitter alternative Mastodon is celebrating the launch of a significant refresh of its Android app. The new app, released over the weekend, features a complete Material You redesign — Google’s design language for Android — as well as revamped features such as tab bars, settings, a compose screen, and more.

Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko shared news of the update on the Mastodon blog, as the social network — including its mobile apps, web version, and third-party clients — now reaches an active user base of 1.4 million monthly active users according to the company’s own data. That monthly active figure is up 19%, the website also notes, but is down from Mastodon’s peak popularity in the wake of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover late last year, when it had then seen 2.5 million monthly users.

Today, Rochko shared that the number of active users across Mastodon rose by 294,000 over the weekend, and posting activity roughly tripled — figures likely tied to Twitter’s troubles.

According to Rochko, the new Android app out now features dozens of ways to customize the user experience in the new settings screen, ranging from being able to change the default posting language, to reminding yourself to add alternative text for your media uploads, to being able to hide the “boost” and “favorite” counters — the former, Mastodon’s version of Twitter’s retweet.

Android users can also access information about the server they’re connected to and view its rules. (In Mastodon’s decentralized social network, users join a server that is connected — or federated — with other servers across the wider network, and each server has its own admin(s) and moderation guidelines.)

In addition, the Android app’s

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Android Apps

Jack Dorsey-backed Twitter alternative Bluesky hits Android

Looking to leave the Twitter ecosystem? Bluesky, the Twitter alternative backed by Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, has now rolled out to Android users. The app, which promises a future of decentralized social networking and choose-your-own algorithms, initially launched to iOS users in late February and remains in a closed beta.

The exclusivity is driving demand for the newer social network to some extent, but so is having Dorsey’s name attached. For many, Bluesky represents the hope of a Twitter do-over — where the core concepts around short-form posts and a shared timeline remain, but the problems around moderation and centralized control are addressed.

Bluesky aims to give users algorithmic choice, letting them eventually choose from a marketplace of algorithms that let them control what they see on their own feed, instead of having it controlled by some central authority.

At launch, however, Bluesky remains a pared-down version of Twitter without many of the features that make the social network what it is today, including basic tools for tracking likes or bookmarks, editing tweets, quote-tweeting, DM’s, using hashtags and more. It’s also building in decentralization with its own protocol — the AT Protocol — instead of contributing to the existing work around ActivityPub, the protocol powering the open source Twitter alternative Mastodon and a range of other decentralized apps in the wider “Fediverse” — the name for these interconnected servers running open software used for web publishing.

Image Credits: Bluesky

That puts Bluesky on the outside of where a lot of the current activity is taking place around decentralized social networking.

Though Mastodon has been criticized for being overly complicated or having bad vibes, at times, the protocol behind it has inspired a wave of new development following Elon Musk’s chaotic Twitter takeover. Former Twitter

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