14 DAY TRIAL // You may have heard that Twitter shed roughly 4 million subscribers last quarter, but there has been a shortage of explanations for why this apparently serious drop occurred.
As it turns out, it’s not so serious and it’s Apple’s fault, according to Twitters Chief Financial Officer.
4 million users that may or may not have been there, to begin with
During the company’s earnings call, CFO Anthony Noto did his best to explain why the microblogging service had 4 million less users than expected.
Citing an “unforeseen bug” in Twitter’s iOS 8 integration, Noto explained that three million subscribers were lost because of Safari’s Shared Links function, while another million forgot to reopen Twitter, or forgot their password after upgrading to iOS 8.
He added, “We moved on multiple fronts to minimize its impact but it wasn't a one-size-fits-all fix.” This doesn’t sound like a bug to us. Noto’s explanation doesn’t confirm that those 3 million signals were a certainty, since growth can be confirmed only after it’s happened.
Official Twitter app still popular
Despite the App Store offering dozens of alternatives, some better than others, the official Twitter client on iOS remains a popular choice among fans of the micrblogging service. Apple doesn’t release download figures for individual apps, but one can easily assess the popularity of a certain app (with some degree of accuracy) by looking at the ratings.
Twitter currently holds some 300K votes, good and bad, from users all across the world. Few people bother to rate apps these days, in case anyone is asking. Except for the Chinese, who sometimes go out of their way to fake ratings.
Updated just last month, Twitter for iPhone and iPad has Group Direct Messages and offers the ability to shoot, edit and share video on Twitter.