Twitter for iOS was today updated with support for Twitter's upcoming revamped Twitter Blue subscription plan that will enable users to pay $8 per month to be verified on the platform, with other perks such as fewer ads and priority replies.
According to the App Store update, Twitter users in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand will be able to subscribe to Twitter Blue and become automatically verified with a blue check mark when the plan goes live.
According to a Twitter product manager, despite the app update, the new Twitter Blue plan is not yet live and Twitter is doing "real-time" testing. Some users may see changes in their app after the update as Twitter tests the new plan.
Starting today, we're adding great new features to Twitter Blue and have more on the way soon. Get Twitter Blue for $7.99/month if you sign up now - Blue checkmark: Power to the people: Your account will get a blue checkmark, just like the celebrities, companies, and politicians you already follow.
Coming soon… - Half the ads & much better ones: Since you're supporting Twitter in the battle against the bots, we're going to reward you with half the ads and make them twice as relevant. - Post longer videos: You'll finally be able to post longer videos to Twitter. - Priority ranking for quality content: Your content will get priority ranking in replies, mentions, and search. This helps lower the visibility of scams, spam, and bots. Availability: Twitter Blue with verification is currently available on iOS in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK.
The new subscription service has been widely reported on in the past few weeks, with Twitter's new owner, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, promising it will cut down on spam on the platform. Reports suggest that the edit button, previously only offered to paid subscribers of Twitter Blue, will be made available to all Twitter users in the future.
Thursday January 23, 2025 6:41 am PST by Joe Rossignol
iOS 18.3 should be released to the public next week, following beta testing since mid-December. While the software update is a relatively minor one, it still includes a handful of new features, changes, and bug fixes for iPhones.
Below, we recap everything new in iOS 18.3.
Notification Summary Changes
Examples of inaccurate Apple Intelligence notification summaries
Apple Intelligence...
Friday January 24, 2025 1:55 am PST by Tim Hardwick
Apple is set to release iOS 18.3 next week, bringing further refinements to Apple Intelligence features, a couple of neat new capabilities to iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 devices, and bug fixes.
While not quite as packed with new features as Apple's preceding iOS 18 point releases, iOS 18.3 still introduces capabilities that aim to make your iPhone smarter and more intuitive. Below, we've...
Friday January 24, 2025 8:16 am PST by Joe Rossignol
iOS 18.3 is expected to be widely released next week, and that means the first iOS 18.4 beta for iPhones should be just around the corner.
Apple has previously implied that iOS 18.4 will be released in April, as that is when it promised to make Apple Intelligence available in even more languages.
Below, we outline what to expect from iOS 18.4 so far.
Apple Intelligence for Siri
Siri ...
Thursday January 23, 2025 7:32 am PST by Joe Rossignol
Walmart still does not accept Apple Pay or other NFC payments at its more than 4,600 stores across the U.S., and it stood firm on its reasoning for that today.
A spokesperson for Walmart today informed MacRumors that its position on contactless payments has not changed since we last reached out about the matter in 2022. The big-box retailer said it remains focused on its own convenient...
Wednesday January 22, 2025 6:01 pm PST by Joe Rossignol
A new Apple TV is expected to be released later this year. In this article, we recap rumored features and changes for the device.
The next Apple TV will be equipped with Apple's own combined Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. He said the chip supports Wi-Fi 6E, which would be an upgrade over the current Apple TV's standard Wi-Fi 6 support. Wi-Fi 6E extends the...
Tuesday January 21, 2025 4:31 pm PST by Juli Clover
Apple provided developers and public beta testers with the release candidate version of iOS 18.3 today, and with it comes release notes confirming what's new. While we knew about several of the features that are in the update, there are some lesser known tweaks and bug fixes.
The update adds new Visual Intelligence features for iPhone 16 models, it tweaks Notification summaries on all...
Friday January 24, 2025 9:09 am PST by Juli Clover
The upcoming iPhone 17 models that Apple plans to release this year will not feature a smaller Dynamic Island, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said today.
On social media, he said that he is expecting the size of the Dynamic Island to remain "largely unchanged" across the iPhone 17 lineup. His statement is contrary to prior rumors that we've heard about planned changes for the iPhone 17 models.
...
Saturday January 25, 2025 5:07 pm PST by Joe Rossignol
Apple's retail stores will be rolling out "merchandise/floor marketing updates" next week, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
Gurman did not explicitly say if the store updates are related to any upcoming product announcements, but he did mention that next week is around the time that Apple rolls out its annual Black Unity watch band for the Apple Watch.
In each of the past four years, ...
Thursday January 23, 2025 2:48 pm PST by Joe Rossignol
It's also time for Apple's first product announcement of the year.
Last year, Apple said it would be launching Powerbeats Pro 2 in 2025, and the wireless earbuds are expected to launch very soon.
Powerbeats Pro 2 images found in iOS 18 code
In his Power On newsletter last weekend, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said the Powerbeats Pro 2 are "due imminently." In addition to Apple filing the...
Get Twitter Blue for $7.99/month if you sign up now
"if you sign up now"? Will Musk be hiking the price later on?
- Blue checkmark: Power to the people: Your account will get a blue checkmark, just like the celebrities, companies, and politicians you already follow.
When everyone is verified, no one is verified.
- Half the ads & much better ones: Since you're supporting Twitter in the battle against the bots, we're going to reward you with half the ads and make them twice as relevant.
If they knew how to make ads more relevant before, why wouldn't they have done it? More-relevant ads cost advertisers more, have more conversions, and earn more money for Twitter. I know it's a coming soon feature, but this makes it seem like it's going to be easy.
Also, "pay us $7.99 a month and we'll show you half as many ads" is a bit of a request. For $7.99 a month I want no ads. I pay Tweetbot $9/year and get no ads.
- Post longer videos: You'll finally be able to post longer videos to Twitter.
Perfect. I can watch a 10-minute video already, why do I want to any more than that? There are things like YouTube for that.
- Priority ranking for quality content: Your content will get priority ranking in replies, mentions, and search. This helps lower the visibility of scams, spam, and bots.
"quality content"? Just for quality content? Who defines what's quality and what's not? Would it be a team of people he's going to employ (unlikely), or some new code that won't do its job properly? Maybe it'll be written by the team who brought fully-autonomous driving to Teslas in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, maybe 2023?
You know, if Musk is such a genius - as people who have fallen for his schtick will claim - why doesn't he write the code to weed out the bots? Asking developers to print out their code so it can be reviewed is some total non-genius BS.
What's funny is Musk loyalists think he's doing something righteous and bold by opening the blue check to all. But it makes the blue check completely worthless and instead of representing that a person is an expert or figure of knowledge or importance, all a blue checkmark now symbolizes is Musk duped you into spending $8 a month because you are vain.
The Twitter blue check has no value or meaning anymore, thus no status. It's literally worthless now. But Musk fans will now pay him $8 a month for some blue pixels. lol it's insane
