blog.gabrielsimmer.com/content/posts/part-2-acts-flamingo.md

---
title: (Part 2) ATCS --- Flamingo
date: 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.

[Get Flamingo on the Google Play
Store -- \$2.79](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samruston.twitter&hl=en)