Last July, Twitter showed three concept features aimed at giving users more flexibility and control over their tweets and profiles. One of those features aimed to help users make their tweets visible only to a small group of people, similar to Instagram’s Close Friends feature. Twitter called this feature “Trusted Friends” at the time. But it could soon be making its way to users under a new name – Twitter Flock.
An APK teardown can often predict features that will be available in a future update of an application, but it’s possible that one of the features mentioned here won’t make it in a future release. This is because these features are currently not implemented in the live build and can always be pulled by the developers in a future build.
A Twitter teardown for Android version 9.27.0-beta.2 has revealed new strings that hint at the upcoming feature. The strings clearly state that the feature allows users to limit the visibility of their tweets to a small group of people. Like Instagram’s “Close Friends” feature, Twitter gives users the ability to add users to their “Twitter Flock,” and only members of the flock can see and reply to the tweets.
Inner Circle
Recommended
Add
Back
Done
You can see and reply to this Tweet because %s has added you to their Twitter Flock
People won’t be notified when you edit your Twitter Flock.
How it works
Remove
You can see this Tweet because %s has added you to their Twitter Flock
Everyone in %s’s Twitter Flock can see this reply
You’re in the Twitter Flock
Twitter Flock Productive app reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi managed to enable the feature before the rollout and shared the screenshot below. As you can see, this feature allows you to add up to 150 people to your Twitter Flock and share tweets with them privately. Only members who are part of the flock can view and reply to these tweets. Users also have the ability to add or remove people from their flock at any time, and people are not notified when they are removed from a flock. However, as the above strings show, Twitter notifies people when users add them to a flock.
#twitter continues to work on Twitter Flock by adding an explanation of how it works 👀
ℹ️ You can select up to 150 people to be included in your Twitter Flock 👥
ℹ️ People will not be notified if you remove them from the list 🔕 pic.twitter.com/xtGcDiHgxS– Alessandro Paluzzi (@alex193a) January 21, 2022
The feature is currently a work in progress and is not live in the latest Twitter release. Twitter hasn’t shared any official information about the launch yet, but we’ll let you know as soon as they appear in an upcoming beta update.
