Twitter has quietly confirmed the existence of its Twitter Blue subscription service, dropping a reference to it in its listing on the iOS App Store.
Under the in-app purchases section at the bottom of the listing, the social media company says Twitter Blue will cost $2.99 a month.
At the current time, it seems the feature is being made available to select users as part of a test phase, according to Jane Manchun Wong, the app researcher who earlier this month broke the news of the incoming subscription service.
In a Twitter post on Thursday, May 27, Wong described herself as becoming “the first paying Twitter Blue customer.”
She confirmed that the new subscription service offers a choice of color themes and different colors for the Twitter app icon (see Wong’s screenshots below). A reader mode that presents threads in a way that’s easier to read is on its way, the researcher said.
Twitter confirms “Twitter Blue”, which costs $2.99 per month by publicly including such In-App Purchase on the App Store
For testing, I’ve become the first paying Twitter Blue customer 😅
Twitter Blue comes with Color Themes as well as custom App Icons
Reader Mode coming soon https://t.co/RxQHwi6apl pic.twitter.com/UC7kfNS9PE
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) May 27, 2021
Wong hasn’t yet confirmed the existence of other features that she suggested would be incoming in a post earlier this month, though we’re assuming subscribers will be getting more for their money than just new color choices.
In other words, Twitter Blue will probably include something called Collections that lets you quickly save particular tweets for easy access later on.
There could also be an “undo” function that gives you a moment — probably between 5 and 30 seconds according to how you set it up — to stop a tweet from going live should you spot a typo in your text, or perhaps have second thoughts about the content of your post. The undo button is probably the closest Twitter is going to get to an edit feature, which for years many users have been crying out for.
Notably, the monthly $2.99 for Twitter Blue doesn’t appear to have any effect on ad visibility. We were expecting that signing up to Twitter’s new subscription service would banish ads from the feed, but Wong said in a later tweet that she’s “not coming across signs of ads reduction at the moment.”
Twitter Blue isn’t yet showing on Twitter’s Google Play listing for Android. It’s early days, so we should know soon if the feature will land at around the same time, or if those with Android phones will have to wait longer for Twitter’s new subscription service.