My Blog: Flurry for Twitter for iPhone review

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Flurry for Twitter for iPhone review

Flurry for Twitter is a new iPhone twitter app in the App Store that is just absolutely stunning in design. It features gorgeous animations, intuitive gestures, great sounds, and more. Flurry for Twitter is by no means "fully featured", and although I'm always one to argue that less is more, Ash Apps may have left out a little too much to justify Flurry's price.

Flurry for iPhone isn't your average Twitter app. Sure, it offers the basic functions of any Twitter app, but Flurry presents them in a unique and artistic way. Every swipe and tap offers a subtle sound that you actually want to hear and actions like refreshing your timeline and posting a tweet include animations that are almost addicting to watch. For example, tweets will load by flipping up your screen and your timeline with give the illusion of backing up when your create a tweet.

Unfortunately, the fancy gestures, sounds, and animations, aren't quite enough to make Flurry a compelling buy. One of the features I was most surprised to find missing from Flurry is auto-refresh. If you want to see if any new tweets have come in, even when you first open the app, you are required to pull down to refresh. Flurry also doesn't include little thumbnails of photos in your timeline even though this feature has become the norm in other Twitter apps. And one of the biggest deal-breakers off all -- no push notifications.

The good

Easy access to tweet actions by swiping on tweets
Fast, beautiful, and non-intrusive animations
Innovative Swipe-Back navigation system
Conversation include in Tweet details
Fun sounds
Multiple Accounts and Lists support
Instapaper, Pocket, and Readability support

The bad

Crashes at during the second screen of the tutorial at initial launch
No auto refresh
No thumbnail previews of images
No push notifications

The bottom line

Flurry for Twitter is a gorgeous Twitter app for the iPhone that has a lot of potential. But with highly important and valued features like auto refresh and push notifications missing, I can't recommend Flurry for anything more than eye candy -- and at $4.99, that's pretty expensive, especially when full-featured apps like Tweetbot, Twitterrific, and Twittelator Neue are available for less. However, if you have faith that developers will continue to add features to Flurry, you may want to grab it now since Twitter limits the number of tokens available to each 3rd party Twitter developer.