No Official Twitter App for Ubuntu Phone

Canonical has been forced to abandon an "official" Twitter app for the forthcoming Ubuntu phone due to failure of negotiations over the use of Twitter trademarks.



Recently we ran news that Canonical wanted developers to write a dozen core apps that would be available when the Ubuntu Phone launches. The list included the standard smartphone apps such as calendar, clock/alarm, e-mail client and document viewer and listed four social apps - YouTube, Facebook, RSS Reader and Twitter.

News that the plans for the Twitter app had been shelved broke by way of a posting to the Ubuntu-phone team mailing list. by Robert Park, who has worked at Canonical on the open-source social media app, Gwibber, for the past eight months.

In response to a question asking if there was an issue with the core apps Park replied:

So far, Twitter Core App has been cancelled due to negotiations with Twitter. So, disappointingly, official twitter app will be a browser pointed at m.twitter.com. Facebook app is still on until we hear different from Facebook, but no matter what happens, Gwibber is full steam ahead.

Further clarification from comments on OMG Ubuntu and later emails to the developer team reveals that while there won't be a Twitter branded, Twitter only native application for Ubuntu-phone, this won't affect the inbuilt social media features present in the Ubuntu OS. These use the Friends engine developed by Park for the latest version of Gwibber.

Park explains:

Today, Gwibber is a very lightweight Qml app that wraps around our new social media aggregator that we are calling Friends. Friends itself has no UI, it simply does the heavy lifting of sending, receiving, and aggregating tweets/facebook posts/flickr images/etc.

Friends has more features, written in half as many lines of code, and near-total test coverage (gwibber didn't even have a testsuite). Qml Gwibber is very stylish and looks very attractive on the phone, and on the desktop as well.

In the same post he explains that while negotiations to use Twitter trademarks on a native app had failed, Ubuntu-phone's Twitter app is now going to be a browser pointed at m.twitter.com.

What possible good can it do Twitter to be so uncooperative? Surely having an "official" Twitter app on this new platform cannot be a bad thing from its point of view. What exactly is going on is a mystery, but it seems to indicate another reason to be careful when betting your future on Twitter.

Exellent! Please no Twitter or facebook applications!

When will there be maemo on a bit increased hardware??

ubuntu phone is doomed. Cant even getting q simple app for twitter working just shows how overhyped this alpha os is!

Ubuntu Phone is basically running on Android with its own Unity UI and frameset. And superglued together with chroot.

Until they can regular Ubuntu running natively with the proper framework, and a "phone ui" which isn't just a light skin... then we'll talk.

Ubuntu on Android was a joke. Ubuntu for Phone was the punchline.

Whats a punchline. Is it good or is it bad?

Well, If you need to make a phone call, twitter, facebook or whatever and have ubuntu/backtrack/debian/arch linux distribution running simultaneously, you can use "complete linux installer" to install linux distribution and then get another launcher like unity launcher to start up phone etc. while using linux. It works. Linux will not be mercilessly killed by android when you make or receive a call so you can return to where you were in linux. But I agree it is not as nice as a native installation of linux nor as cool as the user interface Canonical has designed.

it use android kernel, and it's cynamogen kernel.
That's what i read.
I think it could be cool to have a real phone with advantages of the N900.
That's where the N9 loose.

Here is my first contact with Ubuntu Touch on a device (Nexus 4), described in this portuguese blog article. Here is the (Google) english translation.

We see that packages without GUI install and work very well. For example, Python and some scientific modules.

Here are some screen photos (while I don't know how to screenshot via software) :

Nice pre-review. I've helped a bit the Ubuntu project by doing some work for the FileManager application. And also suggested that we'd use Nemo's plugin for it so that both projects could benefit - and I'm happy that the Ubuntu folks approved of that suggestion.

And furthermore they've been very clear that it's a big priority to make the changes done to the plugin merged to Nemo's upstream (which also makes me happy). I say this only as a counter-example of the often raised complaint that Canonical does not want to contribute upstream. At least in this instance I've seen nothing but effort to "be a good citizen".