Twitter Apps for iPhone: The Top Five

Twitter released a revised version of its app for iPhones and Android devices that made taking, looking up, and tweeting photos even faster than before, with icons at the bottom of the tweet box that you can click to bring up your smartphone's camera and picture gallery, right while you are composing your tweet. This is certainly good news for people that primarily tweet photos, but with so many Twitter apps for iPhone, and so many possible ways you might use Twitter's services, it might be hard for some to find the right app. Well, today's you're lucky day. Here's five apps for iPhone that you might want to check out. 

Tweetbot

Tweetbot is one of the most popular Twitter apps for iOS, and there's good reason for it. It's one of the most powerful, with so many features, it may take you a week to discover and implement them all. With Tweetbot, you can customize the people you intend to actually "follow" rather than just the people you officially follow with Twitter lists on your main timeline. Direct messaging is easier than many other Twitter apps here, as it displays direct message conversations in a scrolling chat log much like iMessage. There are also diverse filter options that can clean out certain hashtags and users, and even more from your viewing list. But Tweetbot may not be for all users, because this feature-heavy app is a processor, storage and power hog. It costs $2.99.

Echofon

Echofon is a great app if you want something simple and fast, with push notifications, but don't want to shell out any money for the feature. It has a pretty clean interface and speed, speed, speed. While it's smaller and less super-customizable than Tweetbot, that also means an increase in performance and lack of lag while doing something like retweeting or replying to a tweet. It also has some mute functionality, so you can keep certain annoying users or hashtags out of your face. Power users will probably stick to something more feature-rich, but this is a great way to keep up with the Twitterverse for free. The lite version is free, but ad-supported. The pro version costs $4.99.

Twitterrific

Twitterrific is the oldest iPhone Twitter app and, as noted by 9to5Mac, it's so old that the creators of this app even came up with the word "Tweet." But that doesn't mean that it's past its prime. In fact, in its new incarnation, Twitterrific 5, it looks more futuristic than most Twitter clients out there. The first thing you'll notice about Twitterrific is its incredibly minimal interface. You get a simple dark or white space with small line-breaks in between tweets, and a customizable font for your tweetlist of Helvetica, Avenir, Calluna, Proxima Nova, Museo Slab, or Signika. Basically, this is a Twitter client for minimalist design freaks. The main features are pretty simple, and that's the way they were designed to be. A few cool features are auto-dark, which switches the background color depending on the time of day, and notifications, which are still in beta for the most recent version of Twitterrific. This is definitely a client for users who don't want a lot of mess on their hands when looking at Twitter. Twitterrific 5 was updated on May 13, 2013, and costs $2.99. 

Twitter

Twitter's newly updated client not only makes photo sharing faster, but also tweaks a few things about the user interface and account viewing that makes this app worth a look. Definitely designed for core use — viewing your main Twitter stream, tweeting and sharing photos — the Twitter client has made direct messages and account look-up a lot easier as well. When you click on the account tab on the right-hand side, you're taken to what looks like a mini version of the Twitter website, where you can check direct messages easily and even switch back and forth between multiple accounts by clicking on your avatar. Twitter also dropped the boarders around timelines with the updated iPhone app, so, while it won't look as pretty as Twitterrific, it will look nicer. If you don't already have it, you can get Twitter for free at the iTunes Store.

In Memoriam: TweetDeck

TweetDeck, which is owned by Twitter, is also a very popular app for Twitter. It offers more robust options than Twitter's own app, making it another highly customizable client for people who want more in their Twitter apps. TweetDeck is really a Twitter client for the power-browser. While tweeting from this app is not a pain, it's not much better than Twitter's native client and definitely not as feature-rich as others. But you can make and view multiple lists out of your own followed list, other people's lists, tweets from a certain account, hashtags, conversations, mentions, and more. While keeping up with so many lists is more of a pain on iPhone, because it requires a lot of swiping back and forth, TweetDeck is really what you want if you follow lots of conversations but don't focus primarily on tweeting, yourself. Unfortunately, while it was a strong app, Twitter has stopped supporting the app and pulled it from the iTunes store, instead focusing on their TweetDeck web app. So what you have now is what you'll have going forward. It was free, and sadly gone.