Following Twitter w/o missing updates

August 8, 2018 1:11 PM

I've started using Twitter again (in read-only mode) and have the official Android app. I set up push notifications for some users, but it's a little irritating to use the Android notification system as a Twitter interface. What's the best way to make sure that you never miss tweets from selected sources, even if your phone is turned off for a day? In a perfect world this perform identically to an RSS reader, but Twitter got rid of RSS feeds and third-party Twitter-to-RSS options haven't been super sustainable in the past.

Problems with existing Twitter Android notifications I'm looking to solve:

• Overnight, I might get 50+ tweets. Android will only show the most recent n notifications (where n < 50), so there's no way to view these in chronological order
• If I accidentally dismiss the collapsed Twitter notification, which happens more often than you'd expect, then I miss all of the tweets, and the actual Twitter timeline is mostly useless
• I feel like these tweet notifications have some sort of expiration dates; if my phone doesn't have service or is turned off for a long enough period, I don't get all of the notifications

I want a Twitter app that functions like an RSS reader for selected accounts, in that it stores unread Tweets and lets me move through them in chronological order. Ideally this app would have both an Android client as well as HTML, and it would sync read/unread state on a central backend. Does such a thing exist? I'm fine paying money for it.

posted by cybertaur1 to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

I think your best bet may be to make a list of these selected sources. You can then browse just this special list instead of the whole timeline when you want to catch up on your selected sources.

Note: I'm 80% sure that if you don't specifically set a list to "private", the people you add to a list will get a notification that they've been added to your list. Some people dislike this so I would recommend setting your lists to private.
posted by mhum at 1:30 PM on August 8, 2018 [2 favorites]

Best answer: You could use IFTTT to collect all the tweets into something like Evernote, or any other app that you prefer to use. It would have them in chronological order and even if your phone is off the apps will still be sending data to each other.
posted by ananci at 1:35 PM on August 8, 2018 [3 favorites]

Tweetbot works well for showing you a real timeline. I don't use the official client but I've heard there's an option hidden somewhere to disable the popular tweets, faves, etc. that it pollutes your TL with.

Tweetbot has list functionality too although I'm not sure if it "saves your place" in the list timelines. It definitely does for your regular timeline.
posted by neckro23 at 1:41 PM on August 8, 2018 [1 favorite]

FWIW, the Newsblur RSS reader does work for public Twitter accounts.
posted by Chrysostom at 2:46 PM on August 8, 2018 [1 favorite]