Twitter has been making improvements to its Progressive Web App over time, and today, the company highlighted some of the changes that were made over the last month or so. In addition to being served to mobile devices, the PWA is also the basis for the Windows 10 Twitter app, and even desktop browser users will start seeing it instead of the old website as time goes on.
One of the biggest changes made to the Twitter PWA this month is, of course, the ability to manage multiple Twitter accounts from the same app, without having to sign out and back into each account. The PWA allows up to five accounts to be logged in simultaneously, and you can switch between them from the side menu of the app.
It is worth noting that there's a pretty big limitation to this capability, which is that you can't access organizational accounts which you're allowed to manage without having the password. TweetDeck users may be familiar with this capability, and we can only hope that the Twitter PWA will also support it in the future.
Twitter also mentions the ability to add GIFs when quoting a tweet, though this capability was also mentioned in last month's changelog. Additionally, it's now possible to create new Twitter Moments from the Moments page on your profile.
In addition to new capabilities, the team has made some improvements to many aspects of the app, such as the media gallery, security, and parts of the codebase relating to lnk handling. Here's everything that's been updated:
- Media Gallery: When opening the photo gallery, photos will now show up immediately, and the full-resolution will load after. This should make it feel much more responsive, especially on slower, cellular connections. Users of data saver will now not load the full-resolution, allowing them to view the uncropped version or zoom on it without consuming additional data.
- Events: Added “Up Next” functionality on Event pages, now videos associated with the Event will play one after each other.
- PWA: Improved the resolution of the PWA app icon, made it look better on certain Android devices.
- Codebase: Reworked how linking is handled throughout the app, done through a team-wide Hackday. This change is largely invisible, but should improve the responsiveness of certain links.
- Security: We’ve updated our Two-Factor Auth to use FIDO2 WebAuthn protocol, which allows support for more browsers and authenticators while also retaining all of the phishing resistant capabilities security key-based 2FA provides. Only hardware keys are currently supported, with additional support coming later.
There's also the usual dose of bug fixes, with the highlight being the ability to send high-resolution image files over direct messages again:
- Direct Messages: Fixed an issue where high resolution photos would always fail to send in DMs
- Events: Events with long names now truncate much more nicely
- Bug: Some click/press confusion within the App has been fixed
You can access the Twitter PWA by heading to the mobile Twitter website, or just the regular desktop website, assuming you've been selected to test the new UI. On Windows 10, you can also access it by downloading the Twitter app on the Microsoft Store.
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