Image: Nicholas Deleon
One of the few remaining independent Twitter developers has just introduced a new feature that Twitter itself should be jealous of.Tweetbot 4, the latest version of Tapbots' popular Twitter client, is now available for iOS. Unlike previous versions of Tweetbot, this fourth version is a universal app, meaning it works on both your iPhone and iPad. (Tweetbot 3, which was released in 2013 shortly after iOS 7, was not released for iPad.) The app retails for $10, though it's being made available for a "limited time" for $5.The marquee feature this time around is something called the Activity, a tab alongside the bottom of the app that collates all your Twitter activity, including when people follow, favorite, or retweet one of your tweets, into into one News Feed-like view. Unlike Twitter's similar implementation of your activity, each event—a favorite or retweet, for example—is its own standalone entry. This makes the process of seeing how many internet points you're winning significantly easier to scan at a glance.Tweetbot rose to prominence a few years ago, when Twitter (the service) was still openly courting third-party developers to create apps. That changed in mid-2012 when Twitter (the company) said that developers should stop making traditional Twitter clients and should instead focus their energies on creating apps that tapped into Twitter data to create new experiences. One good example of this: Nuzzel, which surfaces interesting news based on what your Twitter pals are sharing.Tapbots soldiered on, however, and it's now them and Twitterrific that are among the few remaining traditional third-party Twitter clients of note. One more bonus for using third-party Twitter apps like these: no ads, and you don't even have to use an ad blocker.