It seems that you can never get everything you want with Twitter on the iPhone. You have a few options with the official app, Tweetbot, and Twitterrific as the 3 most obvious options. I'm not a Twitterrific guy, but I've bounced back and forth between Tweetbot and the official app for much of 2015. They each give a slightly different experience, and for the last few months I have preferred Twitter.app. But I've been using Tweetbot again since version 4 came out last month. Here's what's going on.

Tweetbot 4 is a revelation! Not only is it a fast, stable, intuitive app that is a dream to use. Tweetbot wins on the battle of taking advantage of iOS's latest features. 3D Touch is used in full force and shines in the timeline interface. I've said it many times, but peeking into links and GIFs is amazing. My interactions in the app are incredibly fast and well, generally a delight. Timeline sync also ensures that my timeline, mentions, and DMs all stay organized across my devices.

On the other hand we have Twitter's official app. Twitter juts added a feature called Moments that is very interesting and is exclusive to the official app. It also has a better notification system than Tweetbot and is better at organizing conversations. That second feature is particularly helpful when a couple people you follow go on a long back and forth and dominate a hundred tweets in your timeline. In the Twitter app, that entire conversation is contained in a couple lines that can be expanded if you would like to see the whole thing.

So here I am with both Tweetbot and Twitter installed on my iPhone, trying to decide not which one has the better features, but which one is missing the features I can live without. You simply can not get it all, and that’s frustrating. I am holding out hope that Twitter will integrate peek and pop into their app soon and this decision gets a whole lot easier. Until then, I’ll be stuck in Twitter-app purgatory.