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The official Twitter app for Android is one of the most used apps on Google Play. It's perfect for new users, but loathed by power users. Twitter has insisted over and over that the best Twitter mobile experience can be had using their own apps and have made it nearly impossible to bring a new third party app to the market. Since most people aren't power users, the official Twitter app is just fine for them.

Is it fine for you? Could it truly be the best Twitter Android app? Let's discuss.

User Experience

If you use the Twitter webpage for your main access point on the desktop, or you've used the official Twitter app on another platform, you'll be familiar with the look and layout of the Android Twitter app. It looks and feels like a web app. If you visited Twitter on your phone through a browser instead of using the app, you'd get a very similar experience.

Basically, the features you'll find here are exactly what you'll find on the web. That is, all Twitter features and no third party service integration. Things like Instagram pictures and video won't be appearing in your timeline as anything but links. Only media that is uploaded to Twitter owned services like Vine will be integrated right into the app.

Usability gets high marks from my perspective. Everything that you're allowed to do natively on Twitter, you can do here. Long pressing on a Tweet brings up the standard Tweet options like ReTweet and Favorite.

You can swipe between panels for your timeline and mentions. Then they have panels for trends and your profile. DMs are buried deep in the profile pane, which is no surprise since DMs are mostly used by spammers these days.

Design

The design of the official Twitter app for Android is clean and simple. If you use the web interface, then you'll be right at home. However if you expect innovative design and features from that design, you'll be sorely disappointed.

The best part of this design is that because it's so uniform, if you move to another phone, or start using Twitter on the web, you won't be forced to learn a new interface, as the app is similar (if not identical) on almost every platform.

Twitter does have a function called Twitter Cards, which makes some other services stand out. Things like videos, Vines and pictures, and certain websites, will be displayed in a card like interface that gives extra information pulled from the link in the Tweet. That's a nice feature, and is well designed. Native ReTweets work appropriately in this app too, which can sometimes be a tangled mess in other apps.

Bonus Features

If you're a power user, or you like using services that are outside of the Twitter sphere of influence, the official Twitter app for Android will be frustrating for you to use. If you love to customize the look and feel of your Twitter client, you will also be disappointed. There aren't that many settings, which means you have to live with the way Twitter wants it.

This app is basically good for doing everything Twitter wants you to be able to do and nothing else. There was a glorious time when Twitter encouraged creativity in the app community, but those days are over.

One new feature that I'm loving, and which is missing from lots of the "power user" apps, is the photo filter. When you want to post an image, you don't have to go through Instagram to make it look less like a crappy phone photo. There are nine different filters, and youcan also adjust the lighting, red-eye and crop.

Conclusion

As you can tell, I love playing with new Twitter clients. The official Twitter client is not the best Twitter Android app, but it also isn't the worst. It's perfect for a new user, especially someone who is either new to Twitter or to their Android phone.

If you don't need the power user features provided by other clients, then the Twitter app for Android will do exactly what you want it to do. The app excels at accessing Twitter, and in the end that's all that matters.

Our biggest problem with the official app is that only services that are either aligned with Twitter or owned by Twitter are allowed in. Third parties create most of the innovative features in other apps, and those are kept out, which, at times, makes the Twitter Android app feel outdated and minimalistic.

If I were to suggest a fix for this closed system, I'd suggest that Twitter offer a plugin system for their applications. This would allow for extra features for power users, and would still allow Twitter to control the way the app works. They could even create a plugin approval process, like Apple does in the iTunes App Store. That would solve almost all the problems people have with the official app. But hey, it's just a suggestion.

In terms of doing exactly what a Twitter app is supposed to do, it does the job. And how could it not?

The Official Twitter app can be downloadedfor free from Google Play. It can run on almost all versions of Android.

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