(Part 2) ATCS --- Flamingo
2016-12-08
Flamingo is a relatively new Twitter client, created by Sam Runston. It goes for $2.79USD on the Google Play store, and frankly, is a solid Twitter client. Battery performance is fine, and performance is great.
Customizability
It is a fantastic app for Twitter, and it one of the more customizable clients if you like that sort of thing. You can tweak all the individual colours, or pick from a pre-made theme. You can change the fonts, how and where the pages are and look, and a whole lot more (actually while writing this review I found a way to turn off the giant navbar at the top, so bonus points!) through the settings. It might seem a bit overwhelming, and for the most part I left it with the default theme with some small tweaks.
For you night mode lovers, there is a beautiful implementation here. You can tweak the highlight colour to your liking and also the background, between dark, black, and "midnight blue". Of course, you can also set a timeframe for when you want this mode enabled -- one slightly annoying thing is you can't have it enabled all the time, however the theming options available should compensate for that fact.
Syncing
Retrieving tweets from Twitter's servers was always very snappy and fast, and I noticed to real performance hit in terms of battery or CPU usage when having tweet streaming on. I definitely recommend you turn it on -- I did not test it with background syncing enabled, and didn't really see any need to turn it on during my week with the app. There is Tweet Marker support, which comes in handy if you use clients, and I did leave it enabled (as I usually do).
There is a built-in proxy server setting, which is nice if you want to browse only Twitter using a proxy server. There are also several other options for turning off all retweets or replies, disabling auto refresh on startup and tweeting, and even has a setting for TeslaUnread so you can pick if you'd like to see unread notifications or tweets in your timeline (I assume you'll need to enable background sync for this to work properly.
Notifications
Notifications, as with any third party Twitter app I've tried, were slow to come in but seemed to be much more quick when the app was recently launched. I don't know if this is a Twitter API restriction or just an Android oddity, but I'm willing to guess it has to do with Twitter's rate limiting. Regardless, plenty of options here. You can enable notifications for individual accounts, as well as which notifications to show for each account (mentions, DMs, new followers, etc). There are also options to enable notifications only from verified accounts, if you interact with those enough, and allowing you to see which account received the notification, which as a multi-account user I left on.
Other notes
I love Flamingo so much -- the number of options it gives you to make your setup truly unique is astounding. Individual themes per account, alternate app icons, composition notifications, there is so much you can do with this app. I have some minor issues, like it confusing my accounts timelines, direct messages, or notifications, but overall it is a solid app that I highly recommend to those who want to get the absolute most out of their Twitter client.