Tweetbot changed iPhone user behaviour with one simple gesture

Tweetbot is essentially the gold standard in Twitter clients for mobile phones. You won’t find anything better on iOS, Android or Windows Phone, I can promise you that. The latest update released by the company was a reimagining of an already fantastic app and was received with a lot of acclaim.

I’m not sure if the guys at Tapbots realise what they did when they released Tweetbot 3, but they basically redefined how users expect to interact with pictures on their phones. It’s perhaps the most simple gesture that you could think of, but for some reason it hadn’t been used by anyone else up until Tweetbot 3 was released.

The gesture I’m talking about is the one displayed above. When an image is opened from the stream in ‘lightbox’ view, the user is able to throw it away by simply tossing it anywhere on the screen. It’s so simple that it’s hard to fathom why anyone else wasn’t doing it before. This single gesture has completely changed the way I interact with pictures on my phone and has broken my expectations of other applications.

It’s so simple and so obvious after using it that the habit is almost impossible to break in other apps. I find myself trying to toss away photos in other apps like Facebook, Photos and Messages. The gesture is so simple that it sticks in your mind as something that should just be.

From people I’ve talked to that use the app, they’ve experienced the same thing. For those that have used Tweetbot for any amount of time, they’re now accustomed to being able to throw toss away images. It’s that natural.

Tapbots have stumbled onto something genius with this one simple gesture.

My hope is that other developers as well as Apple will quickly adopt the toss to dismiss gesture and add it everywhere that’s applicable.