Thousands of Twitter users aired their frustration over the weekend thanks to a new update to the official Twitter for iPhone app… and specifically its new tendency to auto-refresh the timeline randomly.
Whilst auto-refresh would be a good feature in theory, the current implementation causes the refresh to happen at inconvenient times, like right in the middle of reading a tweet. The timeline zooms back up to the top and the user loses track of what they were reading…
Naturally, the buggy auto-refresh is causing a lot of frustration as it gets in the way of people’s reading experience on Twitter.
The update also appears to have caused other instability issues with extremely slow performance for some users, crashes when composing tweets, among other problems, even when run on the latest iPhone 11 phones.
Presumably, the auto-refresh is meant to happen seamlessly — inserting tweets at the top of the timeline silently. Instead, it appears to happen at random, interrupting users who just want to catch up on the tweets in their timeline.
You can see the auto-refresh issue in action in the video below.
Dear @Twitter this auto refresh happens every couple of minutes (against my will) when I am attempting to read a tweet. Has been happening for days 🤬
When are you releasing a new update with a fix⁉️ pic.twitter.com/eKwE7hQgyC
— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline) November 3, 2019
Unsurprisingly, the general Twitter zeitgeist is not too happy with many people airing their frustrations on the service.
Retweet if you want @Twitter to get rid of the annoying auto refresh feature.
— Kimberley Johnson (@AuthorKimberley) November 3, 2019
Twitter is now almost unusable with the ridiculous auto refresh where you lose tweets as you read them and can’t find them again. @Twitter had better fix it quickly or people will abandon the platform.
— Dr Lindsay Maxwell 💙 Parisdaguerre@threads.net (@ParisDaguerre) October 31, 2019
Dear Twitter Autorefresh,
I WAS READING THAT!!!
— Friney ☕️🌷 (@dimplesticks) November 3, 2019
Twitter has yet to comment on the refresh ‘feature’ but in all likelihood, it will release an update to address the bugs, if not disable the auto-refresh behavior entirely.
Some Twitter users have suggested that disabling reduce motion in Twitter settings disables auto-refresh as a temporary workaround but we could not reproduce this in our testing.
Twitter recently ported its iOS app to the Mac using Apple’s new Catalyst framework for macOS Catalina.
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