macOS Catalina users can now enjoy a Twitter app on their Mac, made via Apple's new Catalyst tech, which lets developers easily port iPad apps.
macOS Catalina was released to the general public recently, which introduces several changes such as game streaming subscription service Apple Arcade; Sidecar, which lets the iPad act as a secondary display; and Catalyst. Twitter is one of, if not the first to join the Catalyst party by bringing its iPad app over to the macOS.
Catalyst Brings Twitter For macOS
Available to download from the Mac App Store for free, Catalyst Twitter looks and performs much like its iPad counterpart. It features a highly similar user interface, save for a few tweaks to make it more fitting for a laptop or desktop experience.
For example, clicking on a video opens up another window. Apart from that, the overall experience should be familiar to anyone who's used Twitter for iPad before. The leftmost sidebar has all the necessary shortcuts for Home, Mentions, Direct Messages, the Trending page, and even Bookmarks.
Twitter for Mac also has Dark Mode built-in, which means it'll automatically change depending on the user's macOS system setting.
Original Twitter App
Twitter had a native app for macOS for years but dropped support for it last year, pointing users to go to the web version instead. Earlier this summer, however, Twitter announced in a blog post that Catalyst, then just announced, makes it easier for the company to support both the iPad and Mac platforms at the same time.
"The new Twitter for Mac app will use our existing iOS codebase, rather than being built from a separate codebase, following the same successful strategy we've used with Web to expand our supported clients," the company said. "By supporting key Mac-specific behaviors on top of our iOS code, we will be able to maintain feature parity across our iOS and Mac apps with relatively low long term maintenance costs."
Twitter for Mac is technically complete feature-wise, but the conversion from iPad to macOS is noticeably rough, as some of the app's quirks more fitting for tablets are retained in this version, which is to say some things are not optimized for the desktop or laptop experience. Even still, take this as a sign of more iPad apps to come.
Have you tried the new Twitter app for macOS Catalina yet? How's the experience so far? As always, if you have anything to share, feel free to sound them off in the comments section below!
