Twitter addicts have plenty of choice on Android. There’s TweetDeck, Seesmic, Plume, TWIDROYD, HootSuite, TweetCaster, and others, so no matter what your Twitter habits you have an app that that fits your needs. Yet I’ve run into something a bit frustrating in the past few weeks. Even though I have stored plenty of apps on my SD card, I’ve been getting that obnoxious “your phone is running out of space” notification. Clearing data works temporarily, but it always seems to get back to that 20MB warning level. It has led me down a path I didn’t think I’d take. I’m back to using Twitter for Android.
Back in December I enumerated the reasons why I didn’t use the official Twitter app. At that time it was a clunky app that had way too many bugs. With all the alternatives, most of all TweetDeck, I found no need for the official app. There was only one catch: I couldn’t delete the official app. That made for some space issues.
Since then I rooted my device, and I tried using Titanium Backup to remove the app. Yet every time I uninstalled it, there it was, back on my applications list. I’m sure I did something wrong, and that if I were a more savvy Android user it would be off my device by now. Alas, it stuck around. Thing is, at around 2MB it is a pretty lightweight app. Compare that to Plume, which is more than 5MB, and TweetDeck, which was hovering around 9, and it’s downright efficient. That played a major part in my decision.
Well, to be clear, TweetDeck was out not only because it took a lot of space, but because it crashed constantly. It seemed as though every time I didn’t check it for a few hours it would take 30 seconds or a minute to actually load, and then it would immediately crash. I expect more from a 9MB application. And so it went in the garbage, replaced by Plume. But Plume is kinda big, too, and combined with the official Twitter app and my ongoing space issues, it also got the axe.
And so here I am, back with the official Twitter app. It’s not the greatest. It does that annoying quote retweet, rather than the simple and accepted “RT @”. But other than that, I haven’t run into many things it does worse than other apps. And, again, it’s smaller than the other apps, so I have more room for other apps on my disk. It’s not an ideal solution, but when it comes to managing the space on your phone, everything is a compromise. The new, improve Twitter for Android will do just fine.
