Almost everyone can agree that X was one of the worst rebrands of anything, ever. A globally recognized brand was killed overnight for a brand that has nothing going for it except having a short URL. It's such a bad rebrand that many months later, most people still refuse to even recognize it happened. There are only 4 reasons I can think of why people would call Twitter X:
- They have to in order to be professional
- They're a diehard Elon Musk supporter and feel the need to support every small thing he does
- As the punchline for a joke
- "I guess it's just called that now"
The new new
Where were you when you found out Twitter was becoming X? I still remember being in the break room, seeing everyone Tweet about how their app was updating to become X. Everyone was making fun of the new logo and how stupid of a name it was. It was becoming more and more clear, I did NOT want this update.
So, I did the most basic thing of protest I could do: I disabled automatic app updates. Keep in mind I have an iPhone, so app updates are all or nothing. When I used an Android, I remember there being an option to disable automatic app updates for individual apps, but my friend who uses an Android says they don't have that as an option.
One thing was clear, I was going to hold onto Twitter for as long as I could. I didn't care how broken the app got, as long as it was Twitter, I was happy.
Why?
But why go through so much effort to keep an older version of an app? There are actually quite a few good reasons:
Less Fun
I don't think people realized how fun and well themed the Twitter brand was until it was snatched from them. Have you ever thought of how silly it is that posts are called "Tweets"? But they've been called Tweets for so long it's hard to imagine short messages having any other name. A post is well thought out, prepared, notable; a Tweet is just a Tweet. A Tweet does not have enough substance to it to be called a post. Plus, Tweet is just a more friendly word. Post feels dark and corporate, Tweet feels happy and fun.
The theming of Twitter goes beyond just Tweets. Have you ever noticed that the home button is supposed to look like a birdhouse? The compose button used to be a feather (I say used to because it started getting phased out in the app a few years ago). Remember when before Elon Musk, Community Notes were called Birdwatch? And remember those weird images that appeared on some screens? Those are called hero images, and you may not of noticed, but most of them included birds.
Don't even get me started on the design system that Twitter created. I honestly think that Twitter had one of the best brand designs. The collaged, edgy, colorful look was and still is beautiful. And the Chirp font, oh my gosh it's such a good font. The Twitter corporate redesign marked when design started to get good again. It feels like the only thing that came out of it now was Taco Bell stealing the entire visual language.
The current design language of X is made up on the spot. Remember when the app store page had the motto "Blaze your glory!"? What does that even mean? When coming up with the logo for the platform, no design agency was hired. Elon just asked his followers to make a logo and then he picked one. And the logo we got wasn't even designed by the person who made it, it's an already existing unicode character. Yes, that means you can paste it into any app or platform, but it's still just lazy. The excuse behind the logo was that Elon was going for "minimalist art deco". Despite the Twitter blue accent color still being used all over the app, the background color of the app icon was changed to black, solid black.
Later on, Elon would add daily rate limits for users to avoid having to pay Google Cloud fees. This caused Instagram to launch their competitor, Threads. Despite being apart of the Instagram brand, the app icon has a white background with a black logo. It was somewhat expected for it to have the Instagram gradient as the logo, considering it was apart of Instagram. The app launch screen even has the logo in a gradient. Both app icons having a black and white color scheme made people who know nothing about design to start complaining that design is getting boring. After all, how am I supposed to use my phone if I'm not being bombarded with colors? The app icon for X was then changed to have a grunge textue added. There is no evidence the grunge was added as a response to the complaints, but I still feel like it was worth noting. People were not a fan of the grunge. People said it looked cluttered, ugly, out of it's era, and like their phone screen was cracked.
Attachment
People can become attached over the smallest things. There's a reason why Gen Z was going through the whole "frutiger aero" nostalgia phase a few months back. People can get especially attached to brands, especially when they're an app they spend all their free time on.
My memories of Twitter go way back to before I even had a phone. My earliest memories of Twitter are when Scratch was down, and right on the server maintenance screen was a link to their Twitter page. The early design of Twitter scared me as a young child. The way some Tweets had large text but other Tweets didn't felt very threatening. Later we got a smart TV, and it had Twitter integration. People are still suprised when I tell them my TV has a Twitter button on the remote but no input button. I remember sometimes opening the Twitter, hitting a random trend, and reading what people were saying. It was especially cool because every 5 minutes, the background of the Twitter window on the TV would glow rainbow, and this also caused the status light to go rainbow too. I don't know why it did this, but it was cool to see the light be anything but solid white. I remember one time looking at a trend of people talking about a horse giving birth, and my whole family tuned into Facebook live to watch it. I still don't know what that was all about.
I remember my 4th grade teacher saying that I would love Twitter, I don't remember why. But he wasn't wrong. Many years later, I got my first actual phone, a KYOCERA flip phone. It was cool, but being able to only message people with a phone number was kind of a deal breaker, because many of my friends didn't have actual phones yet. Plus, I just needed something to do sometimes. At first, I would scroll through Reddit. It worked, but not that well. Some images wouldn't work, and pages were slow. I got kind of tired of using Reddit, so I tried other platforms. Tumblr existed, but I didn't like interacting with people on there (I lurked), and I also could not scroll up once I went down. The only other thing that really worked was Twitter. This was good, because it also allowed me to have instant messaging. Twitter was the main way that I messaged people on the go. This could not happen today, because there is a small limit of direct messages a user can send a day without being verified.
I'm just one person. It's important to remember that each person has their own memories with Twitter (I sound like ChatGPT here). Twitter has saved people's lives, X has not. Like it or not, no matter what, people have memories with brands.
Angry
There's more to this than simply not liking a brand. Like it or not, each of us are insignificant. I don't have billions of dollars to just blow on purchasing a social media so I can get it back to how I want. We are all basically being forced to put up with this rebranding, this new vision of the "future". Nobody wanted an everything app, but we're going to be getting it, whether we like it or not.
That's why I think people dislike these changes so much. If X was to launch as its own thing instead of directly replacing Twitter, I don't think anybody would care. But the thing is that Twitter, officially, is gone, and most likely won't be coming back. All because of a billionaire's mental breakdown. And we have nothing that we can do except for put up with it. The most we can do is pretend like the future isn't happening, and ignore it instead.
Ignoring the Future
Keeping Twitter as Twitter on my phone wasn't really that hard, at first. For the first few months, everything worked as normally. I even got the benefit of not having to put up with dumb new changes, like an AI chatbot or an ugly, transparent tab bar.
But over time, things started to break. Eventually, viewing quote Tweets stopped working completely for older versions, and the ability to sign into new accounts was broken. Viewing quote Tweets wasn't too big of a deal, because you could still view them. Just copy the link to the Tweet, go to search, and type in 'url:[tweetid]'. It's not a fun experience, but hey, it works. And for accounts, I didn't need to sign into any more accounts, I had all the accounts added that I needed. And it's not like I'm going to be signing out of any accounts, right?
did you like the foreshadowing i just did? i liked it.
A few days ago, I had a little bit of a "mental breakdown". That's probably not the correct term for it, but that's the best term that I know, so I'm gonna use it. During it, on my private account, I Tweeted "deactivating my private account for attention now. gootbye!". I then preceeded to deactivate that account.
In the morning, I returned to the app, hoping to sign into the account and cancel the deactivation process. I typed in my login, but instead of being greeted with my account, I just got an error. I tried again. Same error. Then, I remembered. What was I supposed to do?
I logged into the browser client and reactivated my account, hoping that would fix the issue. I typed my login again on the app. Same error. I was starting to panic, and I realized it might just be over for me. Yes, I could just use that one account in the browser, but I only have so much data every month, and using websites always used more data than the app. I was running out of options, so there was only thing that I could do at this point.
New
I accepted my fate and opened the App Store. I tapped my profile picture, and scrolled down to updates. I scrolled down to X. I hesitated for a moment before finally hitting the button I had been avoiding for many months, "Update".
I went to the home screen and watched the Twitter icon get dimmed. Instantly, the label changed from "Twitter" to "X". Then, the update circle appeared. I watched as it slowly filled up, my mind filled with regret during the entire sequence. After about 15 seconds, the circle reached the end of its rotation. I watched the icon fade from the bird to the X. There was officially no going back now.
I opened the app, and it was one of the most disgusting experiences I've ever witnessed. Normally when you open Twitter, the logo does an animation where it fills the whole screen. It's fun and smooth. But now, there was no bird. I simply saw the X, and then a fade to the timeline. Instead of seeing Tweets, I was seeing posts. There were 6 buttons under each Tweet. And quote Tweets, or I guess "Q", still didn't even work! It was overwhelming. I didn't feel at home. It felt like finding out your favorite family owned business went out of business and was replaced with dollar tree. But the worst part was that I knew it was all my fault. If I had only kept calm, this all could of been avoided. But instead, I was being forced to face the consequences of my own actions.
Erm... actually
Android users are probably yelling through the screen right now, talking about how if I had an Android, I could just install an older version of the app. Well, suprise suprise, that's exactly what I did, and I have an iPhone.
Yes, iPhones have had sideloading long before the EU forced Apple to add it. So that's what I decided to do. Not only that, but having a sideloaded client meant I could have more features, such as hiding view counts, ads, and more. I downloaded the newest version that I could get that was still Twitter.
Installing the app was like reverse updating the Twitter app. Because it used the same bundle ID (that's some nerd stuff, don't worry about it), the X icon was cached into my phone. So the X icon appeared on my home screen, and then once the installation circle was complete, it became the bird again. And I was back to the Twitter that I knew, hated, and loved.
The only small thing that was different was when launching the app, the X logo is shown for a split second, before fading into the Twitter logo. Almost everything else was the same.
I say almost everything because there are some issues. Sharing to the app doesn't work anymore, it always thinks I'm logged out. Also, links don't open in the app anymore, they always open in the browser. This isn't a problem on Wi-Fi, but on data I don't want to use the website.
But once again, I am still relieved that I have Twitter on my phone. Not X, Twitter.
Desktop
On desktop, I have had an extension called OldTwitter for quite some time now. I highly recommend it. Not only does it completely get rid of the X branding, but it gives you a really good recreation of the old layout of Twitter. You can also choose between different year design styles. And my favorite part is that you can also write your own CSS for it. I have mine set so it has a theme similar to my website. It's not the best looking thing in the world, nor does the theme translate too well to the Twitter layout, but I'm still happy with how it looks.
Butt
But despite these replacements, there is only so much time until the Twitter brand will no longer be celebrated. Remember, the average person doesn't have strong opinions on rebrands. Something changes, and that's just the way it is now.
A point will be reached when seeing a company, page, or whatever using the Twitter brand over X will be seen as outdated. Think about when you still see the "t" Twitter logo over the bird. It's that again.