Last night on Twitter, I noted that the company’s iOS app now appends a query parameter based on an app’s bundle identifier when you share a tweet’s link via the system share sheet.

As some have noted, this appears to be a recent change in Twitter for iOS, which is less than ideal as the resulting link contains a long string of URL-encoded garbage. More than ugly URLs, however, what bothered me was Twitter’s implicit tracking of which apps users invoke to share links with – something that even applies to core iOS features such as Apple’s own Messages extension.

I wondered whether Apple should consider this a violation of App Store guidelines, but it appears that Twitter isn’t breaking any rules by appending app-based query parameters to their shareable URLs. Benjamin Mayo looked into this feature and explained how Twitter is leveraging public iOS APIs to read bundle identifiers from the share sheet – he even posted a proof-of-concept code snippet to show how it’d work in practice.

He writes:

In reality, this is very easily achieved. As part of the activity provider API, the system asks for content to share for each sharing extension the user has installed. The Apple framework openly passes the activity type to the app. Twitter simply takes the base URL it wants to share and appends the ‘garbage’ before returning.

And:

The important thing to note here is that the mechanism is innocuous and uses valid APIs provided by Apple. Twitter is not exploiting private APIs to achieve this. A cursory look at the app review guidelines suggests to me there are no grounds for Apple to scold Twitter (or any other app) for doing it.

My personal stance is that this is annoying but does not violate user privacy. Importantly, Twitter cannot append arbitrary information to its URLs system-wide; it is confined to cases where users share something from inside the Twitter app itself. I don’t really see a justification for Apple to amend the guidelines to disallow it. I just take it as another reason not to use the official Twitter app.

In conclusion, if links to tweets you copied from the Twitter app suddenly look longer and messier than before, this is why. Personally, while Twitter may be taking advantage of a publicly available API, I still think the implementation is, at the very least, in poor taste – especially because it’s coming from the same company that used to scan users’ devices to list installed apps and deliver “tailored content” based on them. Even though I won’t stop using the Twitter app because of this, I wish Twitter would revert to standard, clean URLs when sharing tweets from the app. I also hope Apple is taking a closer look at this.

Twitter’s latest feature – which is rolling out “in the coming weeks” – is another that’s been inspired by something users have been doing for a few years now: threads.

From the Twitter blog:

At Twitter, we have a history of studying how people use our service and then creating features to make what they’re doing easier. The Retweet, ‘@reply’, and hashtag are examples of this. A few years ago we noticed people creatively stitching Tweets together to share more information or tell a longer story – like this. We saw this approach (which we call “threading”) as an innovative way to present a train of thought, made up of connected but individual elements.

Now, hundreds of thousands of threads are Tweeted every day! But this method of Tweeting, while effective and popular, can be tricky for some to create and it’s often tough to read or discover all the Tweets in a thread. That’s why we’re thrilled to share that we’re making it simpler to thread Tweets together, and to find threads, so it’s easier to express yourself on Twitter and stay informed.

We’ve made it easy to create a thread by adding a plus button in the composer, so you can connect your thoughts and publish your threaded Tweets all at the same time. You can continue adding more Tweets to your published thread at any time with the new “Add another Tweet” button. Additionally, it’s now simpler to spot a thread – we’ve added an obvious “Show this thread” label.

As far as I can tell, this is a prettier interface for the original method of creating a thread by replying to yourself. Twitter has integrated a multi-post feature into the app’s compose box, and there doesn’t seem to be a new API endpoint for threading. It seems like a nice workflow with a ‘Tweet All’ button at the end. In theory, popular third-party clients could replicate the same behavior (and design) in their own compose UIs – just like various tweetstorm utilities create “threads” by posting multiple replies in a row.