Twitter for iOS and Android gets updated, gets Kindle Fire support

Twitter has brought updates to both its iOS and Android versions, bringing some pretty strongly demanded features with the updates. According to their blog, there are some new features that are common to both platforms, and others, which are exclusive to one platform or the other. Here goes.

Twitter for iOS and Android gets updated

The new features that are common to both the mobile platforms are the Swipe shortcut and Find Friends. On the home timeline, you can now swipe a tweet to either reply to it, retweet it, favourite it, share it or view the tweeter’s profile via their post without leaving your timeline. The Find Friends feature is basically a confirmation alert when you choose to find friends using your phone’s contacts. This follows the hot water that applications, like Twitter and Path have been in where they were found to store entire user address books without any notification to the user. If you choose to find Twitter friends via your contacts, you will now get an alert that states that you’re uploading your contacts’ telephone numbers and e-mail addresses to Twitter. Their details will only be uploaded, if they’ve chosen to be find-able via their contact information.

On to the exclusives. For iOS, Twitter’s returned the copy and paste function. They had previously taken away the ability to copy and paste the text of tweets or user profiles, but now it’s back. Just press and hold to copy. Twitter’s also increased the share function where you used to only be able to copy or email a link to the tweet. Now if you see a link in a tweet, you can tweet it yourself, copy it, e-mail it or choose to read it later via the ‘Read Later’ service (which you will find under Settings > Advanced). They’ve also updated the way Direct Messages look and returned the ability to mark all DMs as read. Finally, iOS users can change the font size of their Twitter application under Settings > Advanced.

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For Android users, Twitter’s added support for new devices, including the Amazon Kindle Fire, the Barnes and Noble Nook Color and the Nook Tablet, which will release on the 23rd of February. The app is also updated to support other Android devices running Ice Cream Sandwich. To download or update Twitter for your iOS or Android device, go to the iOS App Store or the Android Market.