Rowi gets updated for Windows Phone 8, gains impressive performance boost

By Sam Sabri
last updated

The number of Twitter applications taking advantage of new features in Windows Phone 8 goes up almost every day it seems like. Today, Rowi gets an update that brings it to a level playing field with other apps like glƏƏk!, MeTweets and upcoming Twabbit. Observing the Windows Phone community the past few weeks you might notice a trend of each client having a loyal fan base.

So what can Rowi users look forward to in this new update? Read on, crouton.

Rowi has always been a nice Twitter client for Windows Phone and brings some new features for users on Windows Phone 8. If you’re rocking a Lumia 920 or HTC 8X you can look forward to now being able to:

  • Bug fixes
  • Support for all Windows Phone 8 screen resolutions
  • Performance optimized for Windows Phone 8
  • Voice commands like "rowi tweet" with support to translate voice to a tweet
  • Support for new small and wide live tiles

Holy cow. They were not joking around about optimizing performance for Windows Phone 8. This thing is simply fast. From launching the application the first time to swiping left and right while interacting. It’s fluid and with no lag in the application that I could find. 

Taking advantage of the voice commands was also a nifty little feature. All you need to do is say “Rowi...tweet”. You’re then launched into composing a tweet and you can do that by voice as well, however you can’t send the tweet by voice and will still need to physically send it.

I would have liked a few more features for their latest update. Maybe some sort of functionality that took advantage of updating the lockscreen, a neat trick that a lot of apps designed for Windows Phone 8 are taking advantage of these days. Another neat idea would be the ability to schedule tweets for later, something that MeTweets does.

All that being said, Rowi is another great option in a strong list of potential Twitter clients for you. Choice is a good thing so you should give Rowi a spin and see if it’s for you. You can download the full version for $1.49 (with Trial) or a lite version. Grab the full version right here in the Marketplace and the lite version here or use the QR codes below (Lite on the left and full version on the right).

QR: Rowi Lite

QR: Rowi

So, what’s your favorite Twitter client on Windows Phone 8 right now? Sound off below.

Sam Sabri
Sam Sabri
65 Comments
  • Straight loving all of these WP8 app updates
  • Why did they make the tile black? Massively stupid.
  • Not stupid, I like black. Sometimes you want less colour on your start screen. What would it be like if all the apps on windows phone had accent themed live tiles. Laaaame
  • They should provide the option, either way. Having a small black tile in the middle of matching accent tiles looks bad to me, personally. Speed improvements are great, but on this on the tile issue, they failed.
  • Which is your opinion, but I (like many) like a bit of diversity and color to my screen, so among a sea of pictures, graphics, and accent-colored tiles, I would appreciate a tile like that. (I don't, however, use Rowi.)
     
    That said, there are other Twitter apps with different tiles, so perhaps one of them is more suited to you. After all, the whole point of this endeavour is that Windows Phone is yours... do with it what you want. :)
  • I like some diversity too but I don't like that it leaves a black hole in your grid. (when using black background) A white icon would be accepted I think to offset the black background (maybe an option in the app??)
  • Doing it without an option to use theme color was a silly decision. I say that as an app developer. You don't take away choices from your customers, you give them options. There was no technical reason for them to do this.
  • The color depends on your choice of background color. Mine is still blue after the update
  • It'll update eventually to the black tile. Takes a few minutes for the tile to update itself after you update the app. It'll be black, because that's the only choice.
  • Have you unpinned it and pinned it again. New tile black only, if it's still the same color its still the old tile
     
  • I'm not a huge fan of the black tile either, as I wish it still followed a user's accent color, or simply allowed for an option to choose between live tile colors/styles.
     
    Suggestion made on their uservoice site: http://rowiapp.uservoice.com/forums/100245-rowi-for-windows-phone/sugges...
  • Chill, I bet they will make that option (to change tile color) available in the near future.
  • No one needs to 'chill', we are simply offering our opinion on the black tile.
  • Yeah I'm not a fan. It looks so out of place and goes against everything that MS encourage with their app development. I too hope they give a choice for tile colour
  • Totally fine to not be a fan. You're not alone. That said, it does not go against any Microsoft design guidelines and is very much encouraged for tiles to be whatever the developer wants them to be.
    We'll let the dust settle and see how everyone feels and make an appropriate decision on if we'll add a setting or not. We always get there through a combination of our own original thoughts and design decisions and community feedback. :)
    -Erik
  • Based on a Twitter exchange with them, the decision was "mostly" about their branding. The solid black tile with the white icon/lettering is a consistent look they are trying to achieve. Which is fine - but I still say you don't shove your branding down the throats of your users.
    If you want to have that be the default experience, fine. Who would begrudge them that? But you offer users the choice - especially the users that have been your loyal, paying customers.
    If, as they admit now, "people are divided on the issue", then clearly you've made a good portion of your customers unhappy, even with what you think a minor cosmetic change. Which isn't really minor - since it fundamentally alters the asethetic of the start screen (black on black).
  • As I mentioned on Twitter, we always get there eventually. We can't know how people are going to react until we try it. We'll let the dust settle and see how everyone feels after a bit and make a decision on adding a setting or not and prioritize it with the rest of our features. :)
     
    -Erik
  • I asked them about lock screen notifications and they told me it was "too hard." :/
  • Hopefully in a future release
  • What the hell! Really? I pretty sure if they ask MS for help they will help them out.
  • Actually, I don't think it's possible using the current SDK, at least without making changes they don't want to make.
    To put an icon on the lock screen your tile must be an "iconic" tile. The Iconic tile is pretty cool. It let's the count act like the message hub - be big and beautiful, with the animations. BUT, you can't use the Flip to put things on the other side, and that count must be visible - and they wanted to use their own logic to display mentions and dms seperately.
    There's also a bug which makes it hard to change a released app from using a Standard Tile to using an Iconic Tile.
  • It's all possible, but like you said, we'd have to change everything. Lock screen notifications only work with the Count property of the tile. We don't use that at all today and are drawing our own custom counters on the tile itself. We'll do something here in the future, but it's a lot of work, especially given we have a push notification service behind all this. All doable, just takes time.
    -Erik
  • Actually they said that it was "a major change" and "doesn't fit into how we do things" https://mobile.twitter.com/rowiapp/status/274796378222362625
  • I wish it had a different color scheme more like the official Twitter app. I'm rather tired of black on white or white on black. COLOR!!!
  • Me tweets has a customizable color scheme I think, but in the end I stopped using it BC rowi was so much faster.
  • Damn the app is fast. Launches as fast as the people hub or messages
  • Wow, got even better. Blazing fast.
  • Any apps that show "interactions" and not just mentions? i.e. When a tweet of yours gets favorited
  • Twitter does not provide an API for that. Push notifications can be setup to show new favorites though.
    -Erik
  • Just can't believe they didn't do anything with the lock screen.
  • It's a major change across the board for how our tiles and notifications work so we decided not to do it yet. Later.
    -Erik
  • Lesigh I need to get a wp8. I want the ativ s hope at&t gets it otherwise I'm dropping at&t when my contract is up.
  • Why the Ativ instead of the Lumia 920 or 8x?
  • Ativ is more feature complete, lightest, and largest. It's a pretty good phone.
  • More feature complete? What? I laugh whenever somehow touts both lightness and largeness. If you're going for portable and light, why would you want huge? If you want huge, why are you caring about a few grams? That candy you left in your pocket probably weighs more than the difference.
  • Why are you bashing him for wanting the ativ-S... Really? Its not like he deserves to be stoned for wanting something other than 920. I have a 920 but was torn between it and 8x. And if the ativ was on time, probably would have been even more torn at the sight of it in store
  • Reading comprehension is key. I never said he shouldn't like the Ativ, I'm contesting his unconvincing justification for it.
  • Lovin it. I don't agree with the black tile though. Wish there was an option to have it reflect my theme color
  • We might add an option in the future. http://rowiapp.uservoice.com
     
    -Erik
  • Not seeing a good reason to not just use the native Twitter client instead... What am I missing here.
  • The native twitter client may be acceptable for keeping up with small groups like maybe your family but for a real tweep with hundreds, or even thousands, of followers or following multiple lists, or utilizing multiple accounts, then a powerful twitter client is a must.
  • Yeah, I just realized that. Fair enough. :P
  • It also uses Readability when opening links, plus it uses Aviary's image editing SDK that Twitter just added to the iOS and Android app. There are several other reasons why it's better, but those are my favourite features.
  • My favorite is still Mehdoh and hope it gets an update soon but I own just about all of them including it, carbon, gleek, and several more that fell to the wayside. For sure I am going to give Rowi another spin with its wp8 enhancements as Rowi was already pretty good so it could work its way to first place.
  • I finally just switched to Twabbit recently, mainly because of the increased information density I can get with the smallest fonts.  I'm not a fan of its icon, but I deal with that. I still would love to see a Twitter app that had a live tile that kept track of how many messages on my timeline I hadn't read in addition to the DMs and mentions that all the others do, though.
     
    Edit:  Just discovered that Peregrine does exactly what I want, AND it fits the same amount of tweets in less space than Twabbit (because Peregrine's pivot menus are much larger).  Twabbit has better features and is a little nicer looking, but I might be switching twitter apps for the millionth time since I got a WP7 device.
  • Havin a great time with cowlick...gna stick with that one...rly love the UI 
  • Bought MoTweets early on and have yet to see a good reason to switch. I mean besides lack of updates for awhile now.
  • Loved MoTweets early on as I previously used it on Winmo but its probably the slowest of the good twitter apps IMHO ;-)
  • Just gave it a quick spin and there is lot to like. Much, much improved, and it is screaming fast, however I still like Mehdoh's link preview and picture preview implementation better... and overall it seems (to me) to take more clicks to get things done which takes away from its speed. I do thinks its a beautiful twitter app with some metro elegance and I like it better than my next favorite, Gleek. (somebody please tell me how to type a backwards "e" on my win phone.)
    I also like the easy setup for your screens. Very quick and simple to add anything you would want. Very nice :-)
  • Anyone can check if they are still wasting horizontal space on their layout? Like Gleek.
    This is the only reason I don't use them. The tweet content looks "cramped" with available space on the right but it gets unused. My favorite is still Mehdoh (waiting WP8 update) but I have tried (and will keep trying) every new version of the main clients.
  • No ajua, Rowi looks more like Mehdoh in that department but I think I still prefer Mehdoh though, like you. Its fast enough and its UI is hard to beat. I'm still gonna bounce back and forth between them and see if a little time changes my mind as it took a bit before Mehdoh overtook Carbon for me. For a while I was worried that Mehdoh would become unsupported but the last update was killer and to me its still better than the others with W8 updates so I am anticipating even more goodness if he updates it.
  • After seeing this video, I can see that the Rowi team decided to use all the horizontal space for the tweet content. Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOwxuhPxuqM&feature=youtu.be
     
    I'm going to try it right now.
  • hahhaq I was right all along from previous of Daniel saying I have no argument of other twitro app. I said rowi better and yes say it again rowi is still best twitter app. I was right all along. :-P
  • I seriously disagree especially if you like features. The inability to pin a new Tweet to your screen, lack of customizations, no lockscreen support at all, etc. is a bit of bummer for WP8. It's a nice app--fast and clean--but I think it's far from true that it's the "best" out there. MeTweets and Twabbit by comparison have a much better feature set (and more frequent updates) e.g. picture preview in MeTweets, streaming,  mute filters, save for later, etc. If all you need is "basic" then Rowi is a good choice. For those who want more, it's perhaps not.
  • Is there just something you like better about their picture preview (because we have it). Same for save for later. We'll add streaming eventually, but probably not filters as we find most people don't care about that. Hardcore users do for sure, but with Rowi we shoot for the 80%.
     
    -Erik
  • Apparently you can no longer pin lists to start screen anymore.
  • Temporarily, correct. It was going to be a ton of work to update that feature and decided to cut it for now. It'll be back later.
  • I found a setting that made the context menu more like Mehdohs which I prefer over the default which helped with one of my minor complaints. Does anyone know if it shows your twitter avatar on the live tile like Mehdoh does?
  • No, we don't have that feature. http://rowiapp.uservoice.com
     
    -Erik
  • Hey People, what do you think about Tweetro for Windows Phone?
  • Tweetro for Windows Phone??? I love Tweetro (now plus) on Windows 8 and think its the best twitter app hands down but have never seen a wp8 version???
  • I have Rowi installed..live tiles doesn't work right..hope this update fixes my issues
  • I updated rowi and now I can't pin the "new tweet" tile to my start screen.... when open "new tweet" in the app and open the menu under the elipses it just says add #nowplaying.... ..... also my live tile says i have 2048 unread mentions.. when i know for sure that it is not true.
     
  • Correct. Pinning was temporarily removed because it was going to be too much work to update for now. It will be back.
    For the tile issue, try marking a tweet as read or unread manually if it gets stuck like that.
  • Anybody have problems uploading photos. Haven't payed for it yet because I am still trying but it shows an error message when I upload so it's not a payed feature I assume?