Betas

One of the exciting things you can do in our digital world is become a beta tester. Lots of companies and organisations let you test out their new upgrades ahead of rolling them out to the population. It’s quite good fun if you like that sort of thing. They let you see features ahead of the population at large, and you can feed back your thoughts about a product – perhaps sorting out bugs and small problems before the push the product out more widely.

But they usually come with some kind of health warning. Things might break. Badly. It’s your choice.

I’m in the Android Twitter beta programme. The Twitter application gets refreshed quite a lot as their development team test out new features and ways of presenting things.

Unfortunately, their current Android app build is broken. It only broke for me at some point last night, but looking around – on Twitter, of course – it seems that others found it to be broken early during the weekend.

As things stand I can’t update my timeline or send a Tweet. I do have alternatives – the website for starters, and Tweetdeck on desktop (the Chrome app lives permanently in a tab). But I’m surprised how long Twitter has taken to sort out the issue. The easiest thing to do would be to roll back to the last working version. But as I write at 4.30pm on a Monday, it’s getting on for a full 24 hours that it has been broken for me.

A workaround is an uninstall/reinstall. But that only works for a quick refresh. Then the problem comes back.

A more permanent solution would be to drop out of the Twitter beta programme. If I was heavily reliant on their app, I would. But I’ll stick with it for now.

Such are the perils of being a beta-tester. And no Twitter on my phone for a bit is probably quite healthy (as long as I don’t go to Facebook/Instagram/Pinterest etc).


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