Launching enhanced video player and auto-looping GIFs in Twitter Kit

Monday, 25 January 2016

Less than two months ago, we introduced support for native video in Twitter Kit, empowering you to tell the best stories with full-screen videos and GIFs from Twitter. Since then, we’ve seen top publishers like @BuzzFeed leverage more and more video in their apps via Twitter Kit.

Today we’re thrilled to take that experience to the next level and introduce a new custom video player in Twitter Kit.

Launching enhanced video player and auto-looping GIFs in Twitter Kit

Duration and GIF badges seen on preview images

We’ve upgraded our video player and previews to match the familiar interface of Twitter’s native apps. Your users can now see the duration of a video on the preview image before initiating a playback, which reduces the barrier for them to watch and helps you further engage your users. On top of that, GIFs now receive special treatment with a unique badge (showing “GIF”) and auto-looping playback to maximize your users’ viewing pleasure.

Launching enhanced video player and auto-looping GIFs in Twitter Kit
New custom video player

While we were at it, we also made Tweet displays more language-aware, adjusting layout and alignment based on the language of the Tweet. Right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew are now more legible, independent of the language settings of the device.

This is just the first of many new features we plan to build in 2016, to help you attract, engage, and retain your users with the unique content that you can only find on Twitter. Please note: to focus our efforts on building the best tools, we are planning to deprecate support for devices running iOS 7 after this version 1.15 release. But don’t worry! If you still need to support devices with iOS 7, you can continue to use older versions of Twitter Kit through CocoaPods. We’ll continue to maintain security releases on this 1.15 release to cover old iOS versions for the coming months.

We couldn’t wait get this new release into you hands. Tell us what you think by Tweeting @TwitterDev with #HelloWorld — we’re always listening!