Twitter Makes It Easier to Get to a Reverse-Chronological Timeline, but Harder to Stay There ⇥ techcrunch.com

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

Twitter today is updating its app to make it easier to switch between the algorithmically programmed Home timeline and the feed that displays the “Latest” tweets. Typically, when users want to move between timelines, they have to tap the “sparkle” icon in the top-right of the screen, then do so again to switch back. But starting today on iOS, tapping that icon will offer the option to pin both the Home and Latest timelines to your Twitter Home page, so you can instead swipe back and forth between the two feeds.

True to this pitch, this update makes it far easier to toggle between the two views. But if you prefer always using a reverse-chronological timeline, this update makes it worse: when the Twitter app is kicked out of memory, it will return to the algorithmic timeline by default.

If you enjoy switching between the two views regularly, this update is probably great. But if you prefer always seeing a timeline sorted by date, this over-engineered solution is probably not what you are looking for. Thankfully, Twitter’s latest API version is making third-party apps an even more compelling choice. For example, Tweetbot 7 includes a Statistics tab again because of these API updates.

Update: This change lasted all of four days.