Bye bye, blue bird

We woke up this morning to a jarring black dot on our screen. Did something die? Of course—a little 🐦 (sorry, when we typed, the emoji was blue). While we were expecting X to take the place of the avian symbol, we did not anticipate such a dark intrusion. On our Android screen, there is not a single icon that is black (except for the Firefox icon with the barely discernible black background) and this mournful. Oh, there’s TikTok, but that isn’t this black, this intense. We arrange all our social media icons in a row, and X looks most sinister, like a aphotic black hole ready to swallow everything in its sight. Curiously, the name ‘Twitter’ remains under the chirpy-not dot. On the top right, the app icon badge—usually in any other colour that isn’t dark for most apps—is grey, which augments the baleful dark-lord countenance. There, on our sanguine screen, the monochromatic malevolence.

We did not examine the app itself in close detail (can’t be bothered, to be honest), but things appear rather the same. The Louis Vuitton page, thus, looks unchanged (read: still dull) and their X’s (formerly tweets) just as perfunctory. Assuring to most users? Interestingly, the blue that was identified with the ex-app is still used conspicuously, even when the icon itself is forlorn of exuberance—in the infamous blue tick (why not black now?), the underscores of the tabs, the highlighted text of ‘Show more’, the background of the floating ‘posted’ capsule-shaped bar, the ‘+’ dot to start a new post, the @ and # hyperlinks, and, most prominently, the equivalent of a cover image, if one is not used. Above them all, the lone X sits in the centre, like a third eye: unfriendly, watchful, disquieting, portentous. However hard we try, we just can’t ignore its intent gaze.

Update (31 July 2023, 09:30): Users of iPhones (or iPads) are, for now, luckier. They will still be using Twitter. Apparently Apple is unable to let X be called X as the App Store requires apps to have more than a single letter in its name (minimum two), according to news report. It isn’t known if Apple will come to a special arrangement with Elon Musk or if Mr Musk will strike a deal with Apple to allow his X to exist in the App Store. For the moment, at least in the App Store, Twitter lives. Unfortunately, not the Blue bird. The letter X is very much present.

Screen grab: SOTD