I am certain a couple of people yesterday spent several minutes looking for the navigation bar on twitter, especially those ones who use the night mode like myself. This moment your navigation bar is on top, next moment you are opening your Twitter account, boom! it’s now on the bottom, neither did you change any settings or updated the Twitter application. Well, just to clear the air, this change requires no update from the Play Store and as long as you have the latest version of the app already installed the change should happen automatically server-side.
A couple of months ago, Twitter started testing a bottom navigation bar in its Android app. This came as no surprise to some of us since many apps from Google and others have been following this UI trend in response to the ever-increasing size of our smartphones. Twitter has now officially announced, on Twitter, that the test is over and the bottom navigation bar is here to stay.
It’s a relatively simple change, on the face of it, that really just takes the four options from the top bar — Home, Search, Notifications, and Messages — and moves them to the very bottom of the screen. This makes it so much easier and more comfortable to reach those buttons with your thumb.
There are other less important tweaks, such the sizing of the search box and a new settings cog in the top right of the search screen that used to be an icon for adding contacts, but the rest of the app is unchanged. The UI in my Twitter app switched while I was writing this without any update to the app via the Play Store, so we’re looking at a server-side switch. It shouldn’t be too long until it reaches your device too.
The bottom navigation bar is essentially shifting the top-level sections, such as Home, Moments, Notifications and Messages from above the timeline to below. This is more in line with Google’s Material Design guidelines, which now dictate that top-level navigation bars should ideally be at the bottom, likely to make them easily accessible on phones with big screens.
Indeed, you can now jump from the first tab to the fourth in the Twitter app directly without having to swipe three times or stretch your thumb. The ability to swipe between tabs has also been removed as per guidelines.
In a nutshell, currently, the tabs take too much space at the bottom, so you see less content than you did before. They also don’t hide when you scroll as they should. It will also take some time to get used to not swiping and just tapping on them. Some parts of the UI are still up top, like the search bar, so you’re not done stretching yet. Overall, though, it’s a good change and something users would get used to soon.
