The site will now remember which tab you selected last
Twitter seems to have a touch of identity dysphoria that even predates its purchase by non-reclusive billionaire Elon Musk. Despite its initial success being rooted in timely, consumable blurbs, the company constantly tries to push the type of algorithmic home feed made popular by slower-paced, longer-form social media sites. Thankfully, users of the platform never seem to let Twitter stray too far from its origins.
Earlier this week, Twitter split its home feed into two tabs: For you and Following. The first tab used an algorithm to recommend content you might be interested in, without much focus on when the tweets were posted. The second tab, Following, was Twitter’s classic reverse-chronological timeline, containing only posts from accounts you follow, and always showing you the latest news first. The tabs could be swiped between for easy access, but tapping the Sparkle icon at the top of the feed no longer gave you the option to set For you as the primary view — in effect, the algorithm was now the default, and there was no escaping it.
After predictable backlash, CEO Elon Musk announced that the company would work on a feature that would remember which of the tabs you last visited. That feature was formally unveiled by the Twitter team today — now, the web version of Twitter remembers which tab you last selected and automatically defaults to that option when you next load your home feed.
Twitter says this feature will make its way to the Android and iOS apps in the coming days, but Android Police tipster Moshe reports that the latest alpha build of the app was already exhibiting this behavior for them. Sadly, this wasn’t the case when we did our own testing, which could point to an account-based or server-side rollout for the feature on mobile.
If you want to try your luck and see if you can get the Android app to remember your preference for the Following tab, you can sideload a newer version. For best results, try the latest alpha release of Twitter from APKMirror.
Thanks: Moshe
