Twitter says it lost 4M users because of iOS 8 rollout

As a part of Twitter's quarterly earnings announcement earlier this week, the social network's CEO Dick Costolo and CFO Anthony Noto commented about how Apple's release of iOS 8 in 2014 led to a loss of 4 million active users. The information was related to Twitter's user growth, and as the number of active users per month is seen as an important benchmark for social networks, it was noted that the 288 million users Twitter was reporting could have been 292 million if not for the issues with iOS 8.

Following the conference call, Costolo and Noto clarified that they weren't blaming Apple directly for the change in active users, but that changes in iOS 8 led to differences in the way Twitter tracked users on its own side. Costolo stressed that Twitter maintains a good relationship with Apple and any bugs in tracking active user numbers have been fixed.

The difficulties stem from iOS 8 no longer auto-polling Twitter feeds for the Shared Links feature in Safari. Put simply, in iOS 7, that Shared Links feature was automatically checking your Twitter account to fill that tab with links shared by the people you follow. iOS 8 changed the way Shared Links works, and Twitter says that accounted for some 3 million users.

Humorously enough, the other 1 million was chalked up to Twitter users forgetting their passwords. The debut of iOS 8 also saw Apple release the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus in a similar time frame, which meant many people upgrading their smartphones. Twitter says it believes some users simply forget their password when it came time to sign-in, or download the Twitter app, on a new device.

VIA Apple Insider

SOURCE Bloomberg