Twitter App Disappears From Apple Watch Following Latest iOS Update [Updated]

[JobsIsMyHomie]

It is perhaps because the required Swift library size increased by 11MB. Watch apps are limited to 50MB and the required Swift libraries account for 36MB. You may think 14MB is more than enough, but when you take into account internal or external frameworks that might be used for analytics, networking, business rules, etc. fitting all of that into 14MB is virtually impossible.

I'm not saying that it isn't any of the other reasons people have speculated about, but as an engineer dealing with the size problem I would suspect they are facing the same issue. Given the app update they pushed my guess is the only option was to remove watch support for the time being.

 

[Marconelly]

I honestly don't get why people do this. Developing for the watch is actually rather interesting and its not some horribly difficult thing to do.

Sure there are some special considerations to take but its a lot simpler than the phone. Even the layout on the watch is done for you for the most part.

It's true that it's very simple for some simpler apps, but the moment you start doing something that requires more complex views structures, reliable connection with the phone or networking in general, things would start to be very shaky, and it required constant vigilance and figuring out what went wrong with the x.1 OS update all of a sudden, or why does app sometimes doesn't starts if I launch it right after it installs, or many other weird things like that. Things which I think would be affecting Twitter app, especially if it hasn't been updated in a while. This is not even to say that for the longest time it was an absolute hit and miss to even get debugging to work on a real device, which was incredibly offputting - and I'm sure doubly so when you work for someone else, and on strict deadlines.

I think that finally with WatchOS4, all the obvious kinks seem to be ironed out - but I used to think the same with watchOS3, and then they created memory leaks with complication updates in 3.1 :\
There's an undeniable sense of stability and reliability with iOS in comparison, even if it's not quite as easy to make a simple app.

It is perhaps because the required Swift library size increased by 11MB. Watch apps are limited to 50MB and the required Swift libraries account for 36MB. You may think 14MB is more than enough, but when you take into account internal or external frameworks that might be used for analytics, networking, business rules, etc. fitting all of that into 14MB is virtually impossible.

I'm not saying that it isn't any of the other reasons people have speculated about, but as an engineer dealing with the size problem I would suspect they are facing the same issue. Given the app update they pushed my guess is the only option was to remove watch support for the time being.

I've given up on Swift for watch apps soon after I saw the debugging process copying that swift.dylib to the watch for what seemed like forever. I just said to myself, this doesn't look good... and when I tried the same debugging with some ObjC code, the debugging process didn't have to copy anything, and it was so much faster.