Accurate replacement for Android Twitter app: Owly
I have been using twitter for 3 years now. I absolutely love the concept over which this platform works. It is a hub to share summarized text on topics, events, people, opinions and news. But twitter app is bloated with unwanted information such as ad banners, promoted tweets, promoted trends, best tweets etc. which ruin our reading experience.
The recipe to compose a user’s timeline should be simple, show the tweets by people who the user have followed in chronological order and maybe throw few best tweets in middle.
A long time ago, twitter used to have a simple timeline but the recent changes including two separate timelines, best tweets, suggested tweets, promoted tweets and trends, suggested follow etc. have made the twitter app experience unwelcoming to new and old users.
For quite sometime I have been looking for ways to generate feeds for specific twitter profile to create an aggregate and read them on a separate service like RSS readers. But unfortunately twitter do not provide external feeds on any profile, hashtag or trend. In this case I had to look for alternatives to twitter app.
I came across Owly after trying few many twitter apps from Play Store. And I felt in love with it! The appreciated feature of this app is its User Interface, the sleek design and dark theme is admirable. And although there are great many alternatives for twitter on Play Store, they are all just wrappers of twitter web app with same unwanted information.
These are some of the features I ❤️in Owly.
Simple and Customizable Timeline 📰
The most important feature I want in twitter is a simple timeline, there are two timelines that twitter provides and none of them seems to fulfill this requirement. On Owly timeline is made of latest tweets and retweets placed in a chronological order which refreshes in sync. You can also customize your timeline to omit retweets and replies. So no more cluttered twitter timeline.
Reading List 👀
Another special feature of Owly is reading list. With reading list you can give your timeline a boost to show tweets by selected profiles.
Customizable Appearance 🛠
You can tweak the appearance of the app to your liking. Owly gives you 3 free themes and 6 additional themes that are available in paid version. You also have the choice to change font, header, animation and navigation. Font size has been a big accessibility problem on twitter and Owly solves it.
Ad-free 🚫
No promoted ads, suggested tweets, best tweets or auto playing ad videos. Owly is also clean of intrusive ads both in free and paid versions.
The most amazing feature: Tweet Digest 🗞
This is exactly the feature I have been looking for, a functionality to generate a aggregated feed to read in one go. This feature is not free and comes in the paid version.
Apart from these features, Owly can do almost everything android twitter app does but in a much better way and with a sleek UI. There are some features you will not find in Owly, which are:
- Getting notified when someone likes your tweet.
- Reading old DMs from twitter.
- Changing twitter account settings.
Owly cannot support these features because Twitter API do not give access to them.
You should definitely checkout Owly, it is a worthy and great replacement for twitter android app.
