Twitter Bringing Landscape Mode And Possibly A News Tab To iPhone 6 Plus

This article originally appeared on 60 Second Social.

The iPhone has offered landscape mode support for some time now however not all apps have taken advantage of it. With the 6 Plus rocking the biggest iPhone display we have ever seen so far it makes more sense for developers to start looking at ways to take advantage. 

Twitter has recently started to enable landscape support for iPhone 6 plus users. However in typical Twitter style, this is another staggered rollout which means some of you may see it, some of you won’t and some of you (like me) will have seen the feature and then find out this morning that the ability to go into landscape has suddenly disappeared.

Looking at the landscape feature on Twitter, it certainly has good use when it comes to dealing with messages. It neatly creates two columns, one with user names and then a column of message content.

Unfortunately it doesn’t really have any benefit on the timeline itself, in fact all it does is places the tweet in the middle and creates a good deal of white space on either side.

As we mentioned this is a staggered rollout so don’t be alarmed if you see nothing yet. Another point of interest is that Twitter has been spotted experimenting with a “News” tab in the app. Of course being a Twitter experiment it means that only a small handful of users will probably see the news tab however it looks as if the intention is to provide you with a hub to access latest breaking news so that it does not get pushed down and away from you in your main feed.

The news tab pulls in content from sources such as NY Times, USA Today, ABC News and a variety of other different news outlets depending on location. The only comment from Twitter to Buzzfeed was;

“We’re experimenting with a news experience on iOS and Android as we continue to explore new ways to surface the best content to users.”

It would be great for users who like to head to Twitter and look for breaking news, but again it is unclear if the feature will be rolled out to all users and if so when it may be rolled out to all users.

For now we just have to deal with phased rollouts and question what features we may get and when we may get them.