Newsletter 
We reported a few weeks ago that Twitter was A/B testing a dedicated GIF button in their Android app. It only appeared for a few users for a short time. However, today the company announced that dedicated GIF support is now available on both their Android and iOS apps. You’ll see a dedicated GIF button in the compose window of the app, from there you are able to search through GIPHY and Riffsy databases for the GIF you want to add to your tweet. Making things much more fun on the social network. Twitter added GIF support back in 2014 – users have shared over 100 million GIFs since – but now you are able to simply add a GIF without downloading and then uploading it to the site yourself. Making it a bit more seamless.
With the GIF button in the compose screen, you are going to be able to search by keywords as well as trending GIFs and categories for different reactions like mic drop, YOLO, and many others. Twitter states that the feature is rolling out beginning today to iOS, Android and Twitter.com. The roll out will continue over the next few weeks. So this appears to be a staged roll out, but there’s still no word on whether we are waiting on an app update or if this is a server-side update for the app. We aren’t seeing it on our app on our devices at this time, however.
Having Twitter partner with both GIPHY and Riffsy’s GIF databases is a big deal. Not only for Twitter, but also for both GIPHY and Riffsy. While they already have a good number of users using their databases, their user-base is going to grow quite a bit with Twitter integrating it into their apps. Considering Twitter has over 300 million monthly active users, itself. GIFs are really popular right now, and they already auto-play on Twitter, and now your timeline is about to be even more full of GIFs from people that you follow on the social network. This is likely part of Twitter’s plan to continue their own user growth. After they saw it stagnate in the fourth quarter.