14 DAY TRIAL // It’s almost like he wants everybody to leave. Elon Musk, the new Twitter owner, has announced another controversial change for the service, this time claiming nobody was interested in it in the first place.
Musk said on Twitter that the service will drop the device labels from the platform, which means that users will no longer be able to see what device has been posted to post a specific message.
The “Twitter for iPhone” and “Twitter for Android” tags are pretty common labels, and while Musk claims they are just a waste of screen space, history proves otherwise.
The device labels have been used by netizens to notice all kinds of blunders, including Samsung posting messages on Twitter using… iPhones. Such mistakes typically went viral almost immediately, so after Twitter removes the device labels, Samsung employees can safely use iPhones whenever they want. Google too, as not a long time, the Google Pixel team was caught using an iPhone to praise the smartphone on Twitter.
Elon Musk hasn’t provided any information as to when this feature would go away, but it shouldn’t take too long before it is removed.
“We will finally stop adding what device a tweet was written on (waste of screen space & compute) below every tweet. Literally no one even knows why we did that,” he said in a tweet posted a few hours ago. Interestingly, Musk used an iPhone to post the message.
This wouldn’t be the first time Twitter removes the device labels, however. The first time the platform did that was in 2012, but the information was brought back in 2018. Now the company will pull it one more time, and there’s a chance it wouldn’t come back too soon.