Musk: Next update will drop the defaulting
It’s been three years almost to the day when Twitter began showing users an algorithmically-sorted home feed by default instead of the classic chronological timeline users had grown accustomed to. The company played around with disabling the chronological feed as default last year before it ultimately canned the idea. But it seems the app’s still going hot and cold on the idea — this week, Twitter began shoving Android users onto its newly-dubbed ‘For you’ tab and it seems to have caught enough flak for owner Elon Musk to respond with a mea culpa of sorts.
The change had previously rolled out to the web and iOS versions of Twitter, but Android users are now seeing the tabbed layout as well. Even if you had chosen the Pin your latest timeline option in previous versions, your home feed will now be split into tabs labeled ‘For you’ and ‘Latest,’ with the former being the default.
For you contains content Twitter thinks you’ll find relevant, while Latest is simply a feed of tweets from all accounts you’re following with the newest shown first.
You can switch between the two tabs with a horizontal swipe, so you don’t actually have to tap the button at the top of your screen. However, tapping the sparkle icon at the top of your home feed no longer yields an option to default to the chronological view — instead, you can only “Unpin your Latest timeline,” which disables the tabbed view and makes the algorithmic feed the only option you’ll see when browsing the home section of the app.
These rather unpopular changes follow near-constant turmoil at Twitter ever since Elon Musk purchased the company and laid off many of the social media giant’s previous leaders. Policy changes are beginning to impact Twitter for Android users more rapidly of late, as third-party smartphone clients were just banned and a revised subscription model for Twitter Blue has rolled out with a higher price on mobile than its web counterpart.
On Friday evening, Musk tweeted that a future update to Twitter would stop the app from defaulting to the ‘For you’ tab when users opened it. He also replied to a user suggestion to allow the tabs to be ordered any way they want by claiming it to be a “coming feature.”
User responses to the announcement have generally been positive, but it’ll remain to be seen if sentiment stays that way before Twitter acts on the call.
In the meantime, the new layout with its defaulting setting appears to come with a server-side update, but you can try rolling back the Twitter app to a previous version from APKMirror. Or, if you’re the type to embrace change even when it’s a bit user-antagonistic, you can hit up the Play Store download link below to make sure you have the latest version installed.
Thanks: Moshe
