Meta's popular replacement for Twitter has received its first update, and while it's mainly a bug-fix release, it allows iOS 17 users to finally try Threads out with no crashes.
Rolled out on July 12 on both the App Store and Google Play Store, you can now double-tap the Search icon on the tab to let you type in a query right away, and viewing photos in full screen finally works as intended.
But perhaps one of the most impressive things to come out of Threads since its launch is that it's not felt slow to use one bit. That's a testament to the team at Meta, but while this is a great thing to see, we still haven't heard anything about accessibility features.
Instagram's CEO, Adam Mosseri, has been making it a priority to talk about upcoming features and hidden gems, such as a chronological timeline, and another where it'll show just the accounts you follow. But to many, it's all a waste without some acknowledgment of how Threads will be accessible to those with visual and audio impairments.
What else has been updated?
For an app that's barely a week old at the time of writing, it's been a fun place to share opinions and content, as our own iMore account has been doing.
But in this first update, there are plenty of fixes as Cameron Roth, an engineer on Threads explains:
- iOS 17 crashes
- Double tap search tab to search
- Facepile pill polish
- Expand pics on profile
- Extra tall photos are fully viewable
- Trimmed the binary size
- Fixed random images on the threadline
- Better scroll dismiss handling on profiles
- Other small bugs fixed
To make it easier to search and view photos in full view are both very welcome, as it's been more of a hassle than needed to see the content that's been posted recently.
But the elephant in the room is still accessibility. As we discussed last week in our hands-on impressions and on The iMore Show podcast, Meta has made no mention and no effort with giving users basic accessibility features such as Captions and being able to make text, links, and images bigger.
It's a big miss from Meta, and plenty of users would like to see if the team at Threads is also working on these, apart from a chronological feed and other requests.
We've reached out to Meta for a comment on this, but for now, it's still disappointing that there's still no mention of where these features are.
