What you need to know
- Twitter appears to be readying a new feature that will allow people to save custom search terms and have them trigger notifications.
- The feature isn't available yet and is still a work in progress.
- One Android developer was able to partially enable the new feature.
Twitter appears to be testing a new feature that will allow people to subscribe to specific search terms, generating custom notifications when they are found.
The new feature was discovered by Android developer Dylan Rousel and isn't fully functional yet, but we can safely assume that the same feature will come to iPhones and the rest of the Twitter apps once it's complete. According to tweets by Roussel, they were able to enable the work-in-progress feature and create a new custom search term as well as enable notifications via a new bell button. However, nothing actually triggered an alert, likely because the feature is still in development and additional components aren't yet ready.
Twitter is working on a feature allowing you to subscribe to search results. Once subscribed, you'll receive push notifications for Tweets about your search query!
I haven't received any notification about a trending topic so far though. Either it's not working yet (remember, I enable WIP features), or it only sends notifications periodically to avoid receiving a large number of tweets.I haven't received any notification about a trending topic so far though. Either it's not working yet (remember, I enable WIP features), or it only sends notifications periodically to avoid receiving a large number of tweets.— Dylan Roussel 🇺🇦 (@evowizz) May 31, 2022May 31, 2022
It isn't immediately clear exactly how the feature would work, however. Common search terms could generate a huge number of push notifications, something that might suggest that Twitter would bundle alerts together and send them as periodic notifications instead. That's something we'll need to wait for Twitter to confirm when the feature is ready, of course.
The new feature will of course require that people are using the official Twitter apps. Twitter is far from the best iPhone app for actually using the service, something that seems unlikely to change between now and the time this feature ships.
