Everyone’s still using an iPhone — you just won’t know it
Big companies invest so much money in public relations and advertising, that you’d certainly expect them to approach those efforts with a commensurate amount of care — making sure that the message is clear, on point, and avoids any embarrassing gaffes. But time and time again, we’ve seen companies and prominent people working in the Android sphere make announcements on Twitter, only for their actions to be betrayed by the tweet’s “Twitter for iPhone” source label. That era of very public blunders may soon be drawing to a close, as Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk announces his intent to deprecate the labels.
Twitter currently uses source labels to indicate on what type of device a tweet originated: Android, iPhone, or via web browser. While some readers may find that kind of information just generally interesting, or it might be worth taking into account when some new feature is available on one platform ahead of the others, we always found ourselves paying attention to it the most when someone posted something from a device that seemed at odds with their publicly stated brand affiliation.
Remember a few years back when Huawei was working with Gal Gadot as a brand ambassador for the Mate 10 Pro? A small controversy ensued after she was caught tweeting about the brand from an iPhone.
Not even Google itself has been able to avoid this kind of embarrassment, and only a few weeks back the Pixel account was spotted trying to heckle Apple’s Tim Cook… from an iPhone.
Musk finished off a longer tweet-rant earlier today about some perceived issues with his newly acquired service by suddenly announcing that he plans to stop showing these source labels — and in doing so, remove this occasionally entertaining avenue for seeing some of our favorite brands end up with egg on their face.
Granted, Musk’s motivations don’t seem to have much to do with preventing any more of these sort of missteps, but we’ll be sad to see them end, all the same — who doesn’t enjoy a little schadenfreude now and then?
