Twitter yesterday quietly bumped its iPhone and iPad app on App Store to version 7.3. Aside from a pair of user improvements, the update has removed support for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices powered by the iOS 9 software or older.
“We are streamlining our app development for all clients,” the company wrote in the changelog. “As a result, devices on iOS 9 or older will no longer receive updates from Twitter.”
As of version 7.3, the app requires iOS 10.0 or later.
According to Apple’s App Store dashboard at the time of this writing, iOS 9 and older iOS editions (lumped collectively into the ‘Other’ category) were powering about 5% of devices.
It’s not like Twitter’s move is going to hurt a lot to people.
Folks who still run iOS 9 should update their devices to the iOS 10 software or newer to continue receiving the latest feature updates, performance improvements and bug fixes.
TUTORIAL: How to download your entire Twitter history
Other updates in Twitter 7.3 for iOS include unspecified improvements to the tweet composer, Home timeline and direct-messaging feature, plus a bunch of accessibility-focused enhancements, including rotor support for links within tweets, an improved VoiceOver experience for iOS 11 users and improved Braille support.
Twitter’s been making some developer and user-hostile moves in the past year.
The company has pulled its native Mac app from Mac App Store although this isn’t such a major issue given how rarely it was updated. Besides, there are several capable third-party Twitter clients available on macOS that can come to the rescue.
Tweetbot and Twitterrific, for example, are the two best Twitter alternatives in my personal opinion. However, given that the company is no longer providing its streaming APIs to third-party developers, unofficial apps have now lost some crucial features, like receiving push notifications for tweets posted by specific accounts and more.