The Xbox Has Lost The Twitter App You'd Forgotten It Had

During the shift toward a more secure privacy policy for internet access, a lot of sites, a lot of services and a lot of portals had to undergone some serious overhauls to comply with the new General Data Protection Regulation policy that the European Union rolled out. Well, one of the services affected by GDPR was Twitter, and one of the apps affected on Twitter was the Xbox app that you'd forgotten it had.

As posted up over on the official Twitter Support page, after May 24th, 2018 the Xbox app for Twitter is no longer functional nor available. The Xbox Twitter app apparently didn't meet the new standards required of Twitter for the GDPR, and nobody was interested enough to get it in compliance, therefore the app was axed.

The app was designed to allow you to stream and watch Twitter content in real-time on your Xbox One home console. It allowed you to use full HD and monitor Twitter-curated commentary. The Twitter app seemed to work very similar to most other live-stream services, such as Twitch.tv or YouTube Gaming.

The benefit of the app was that it allowed you to access multiple timelines on a single screen, watching videos and gaining insight from different people sharing their thoughts on the content you were browsing through Twitter.

The app also featured picture-in-picture and multi-tasking so you could also view videos side-by-side or in small windows. The idea was to be able to quickly and efficiently browse through Twitter almost like watching live television... but through social media... and on your Xbox.

So what exactly would cause the app to run afoul of the GDPR despite Twitter being an American-based company? Well, as noted over on the Microsoft page, the Twitter app enabled users from all over the world to access content from all over the world, including European countries subject to the GDPR privacy policy mandate.

The app page description notes that you don't need any authentication or an account, but apparently there was some kind of privacy collection involved, which is why Twitter eventually pulled the plug on the app for the Xbox One.

The app was pretty tiny, clocking in at just 30MB and it launched two years ago during the middle half of 2016. It wasn't an app that apparently got much mileage from the Xbox Live community, given that there are only 625 user ratings, and the Twitter app -- before having the plug pulled -- only managed to garner one and a half stars.

Well, now the app is being buried out behind the shack of other dead apps that didn't survive the GDPR purge.

It's interesting because not too long ago Microsoft actually made it possible for users to connect their Xbox Live account directly to their Twitter account and instantly share HD photos and clips from their play sessions with their social media audience. Yet, instead of taking advantage of the app already available for the Xbox One for Twitter, it appears as if Microsoft and Twitter will let the app fade into the ether.