Twitter has been very harsh to third-party apps that take users away from the official app, when they introduced a limited amount of tokens each app could use, they severed the amount of users each app could register, limiting how much the app can grow. This wouldn’t be such a problem if the Twitter app was a good one, which even with improvements, it always left much to desire. Well, it turns out that Twitter updated its Android app with a few very useful features, regarding both usability and security
Here’s the official changelog for the 4.1.4 update:
Now you can protect your account with login verification. This is a new form of two-factor authentication that you can turn on and manage directly from your app.
Also in this release:
- Enjoy a new gallery view for photos in search results
- Other bug fixes and improvements
What does all of that mean? Let’s take a look at the enhancements starting with login verification. Now you can use a two-step authentication, just like Google has been using, which you can manage directly from the app. This means that SMS verification, which used to be a requirement, is no longer necessary and you can even skip the whole phone number completely, which in turn makes international and tablet support much better, since it now uses push notifications and phone number is no longer an impediment. Also just like Google’s authentication, you can write down or print backup codes in case you lose your phone.
Next up, the new gallery: When you look for photos, you’ll get a “view more photos” options that now takes you to a newly designed grid of pictures that helps you view the results much better. You can swipe through the pictures and select on for full-screen viewing.
I highly recommend that you update if you’re using the official Twitter app, specially for the security features, I think every app and service should have a two-step authentication by default, but I guess it’s not that easy to add once the service is already up and running with such a massive amount of users. You can get the update through the Play Store right now.