Leak reveals major Twitter for iPhone update coming

Twitter’s iOS apps have received a lot of criticism over the past year — particularly the iPhone app. Its lack of power features, and controversial redesign late last year, has driven millions of users to opt for third-party clients.

But according to a recently-leaked change log, Twitter’s iPhone app is about to receive a major update. Twitter 4.3, which should hit the App Store in the next few days, will feature new in-app push notifications and several other enhancements…

Last night, 9to5Mac noticed that the redesigned App Store in iOS 6 was showing a change log for Twitter 4.3 — despite the fact that it hasn’t been released yet. As of this writing, it’s still there, and includes a long list of new features and enhancements:

  • Discover more interactive experiences inside any Tweet: when you view tweet details containing links to partner websites, you can now see content previews, view images, play videos and more
  • Special experience around selected events: we’ll curate accounts and surface the best Tweets and photos from the those involved
  • Improvements to autocomplete suggestions when you search for people in Connect
  • Push Notifications for Tweets: you can know immediately when selected people you follow have tweeted
  • Ambient notifications: enables you to see brief non-interruptive notifications in the status bar while you are using the app
  • Discover: now indicates when new stories are available for the user to load
  • Trends: support for personalized trends
  • Tappable avatars that take you directly to user profiles
  • Performance improvements
  • Support for password entry in app when experiencing authentication issues
  • Hungarian language support
  • Updated with new Twitter bird
  • Many other tweaks, polish, and bug and crasher fixes

The new push notifications addition will certainly come in handy, as it will allow users to be notified when their favorite Twitter accounts (like iDB) send out a tweet. And other new features like personalized trends and ‘special event experiences’ look interesting as well.

Twitter 4.3 isn’t available for download yet. But if you’re interested in seeing the release notes for yourself, you can find them in the Twitter for iPhone app, in the iOS 6 App Store, under Update History. Of course, we’ll be sure to let you know as soon as the update becomes available.

What do you think of the new features in Twitter 4.3?