After Twitter pulled its official app for Apple Watch, Australian developer Will Bishop saw this as an opportunity to develop a third-party client for the social network on Apple’s smartwatch. Twitter has not taken kindly to third-party clients so we won’t know how long this one will be up. But for now iOS users have Chirp as an option. This lets users quickly reply to Twitter notifications, browse your timeline, catchup on trends, view people’s profiles, and many more. You can customize the app’s interface too by toggling on or off different elements like Images, Retweet Counter, Like Counter, Retweet & Like Buttons, and Timestamps. This will show you what you want to see and help declutter the Watch’s tiny screen.
Now, if you want to read and reply to Direct Messages or use Twitter Lists, you’ll need the paid tier a.k.a. Chirp Pro. It starts at US$1.99 and goes up to $4.99. Other features you’ll get in the paid version include posting and replying to tweets, searching for users and tweets, as well as viewing more than five trends.
Because of how the app is designed, the upcoming API changes won’t affect Chirp too much. Bishop says, “The new API restrictions are mainly for the activity APIs, streaming in particular. However, the watch does not support streaming anyway, so fortunately I am not [impacted]… The only API I was affected by were the changes to the direct messaging API.” And that’s why messaging wasn’t available immediately.
Bishop plans to keep the app free but he hopes people will like it enough to pay for the expanded features.