The search for a great Twitter app shouldn’t be as hard as it is, but yet here we are, trawling through the countless apps available on the web, and indeed available on Android. We’ve tried so many that we’ve lost count, and we often came back to the one Twitter wanted us to use. Or we did until we dug up Fenix.
If you’re a Twitter user with an Android phone, you’ve probably struggled with the default Twitter app that Twitter itself makes, and this is the one the company usually wants you to use.
In use, it’s somewhere between a little too basic and not fleshed out enough, and while you gain access to messages, searching, replies, and notifications, it doesn’t really feel like it’s an app made for the Android phone you’re holding in your hand. Rather, it feels like the Twitter website shrink-wrapped and made for general purpose use.
This leaves us wanting, and we’ve been on the search for something better for quite some time.
So, as we said, we tried ‘em all, jumping from the original Twitter app made by Twitter to Falcon to Twidere to Twicca before finally thinking that it’s ok if we spend a few quid on our Twitter experience, and that led us to Fenix.
A little bit different, this one draws much of its design inspiration from the likes of Google’s Android operating system design, offering pretty much an entire screen of your Twitter feed, while loading your profile and unread tweets up top, with a compose tweet in the Material Design style at the bottom.
It’s basic and simple and it works for us, and if you’re used to the way Google is doing things, it continues that trend.
Click your avatar and you’ll find much of the settings that let you get around the place, with quick links to your timeline, mentions, activity, messages, likes, lists, and so on, and much of this leads into why Fenix is such an excellent app, and that’s the feeling that it cuts down on how many clicks or presses you’d have to otherwise do to get doing social networking.
Rather, this is your feed in a straightforward way, and when you click into a tweet to read more into it, you’ll find a conversation waiting for you, while large images stretch across the portrait view displaying them in a way that makes them leap more off the page than they otherwise would.
Writing a tweet is easy too, and you’ll find Twitter users are easy to find and reference as are hashtags, while images and locations are easily added to a message, as well.
Three themes are offered for colours, with light, dark, and black, while the layout has a larger “regular” option compared to the “compact” variety we preferred.
You can even add more than one account if need be, and you’ll find it’s quite easy to jump to it, either clicking on the extra icon in your account or pressing the down arrow and selecting it in your account settings.
Ultimately, this simplicity and cut down amount of touches is what we like, because apps designed to get you talking shouldn’t be about complexity, but rather simplicity, as anything else delays your brain from getting the words out.
And Fenix doesn’t, offering the Twitter you love to communicate on without the fuss some other apps have.
It’s a little expensive at just under $8, sure, but if you’re a constant tweeter, that simplicity could make all the difference.
Fenix is available now for Android smartphones and tablets for around $8.
