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Twitch has had a mobile app for several years and it was already easy to use, but now it’s getting a fresh new design to make it even easier to find the content you love and want to watch. Twitch says the app’s new design was previously in testing, and it’s rolling it out to all users over the coming week.
If you’ve used the app before and didn’t see anything wrong with the design, there are logical reasons for the change. According to Twitch, a lot of its users watch on mobile. “in any given month, over 50% of users primarily use Twitch on their phone, with 40% exclusively using their phone. Most of our desktop users also check in regularly from the app. This is even more pronounced with new viewers — almost three-quarters start watching Twitch for the first time on mobile,” Twitch says.
To that end, Twitch wants to make it more fun and easier for these viewers to engage with content in the app specifically so that they come back to use the app more often.
The new Twitch mobile app design includes a home tab
The home tab is one of the parts of the app’s design that users will notice first. When you launch the app after the design is rolled out, the home tab will be right where you land. This is essentially the new “feed” tab and it still contains the live and clips feeds. You’ll start on the live feed which you can scroll through by swiping up and down just like on TikTok. This is unchanged from the current version of the app, so users will still find it familiar. Although this only recently rolled out in the past few months. The home tab also now contains the follow drawer and stories to see content from streamers that are currently offline.
Additionally, the other tabs have been updated as well.
The browse and search tabs are merging
Another new change is one of convenience. Or as I like to think of it, decluttering. The Twitch mobile app has never really felt incredibly cluttered but one thing that has always stuck out is that there are separate tabs for search and browse. On the one hand, this does make it easy for people to see exactly where search is from the main pages. However, consolidating it with browse makes the navigation bar at the bottom less busy and gives the app an overall cleaner look.
The browse tab will now house the search function, but you can also still look for content based on category like before. In addition to the browse and search functions merging, the activity tab will now house all of your notifications and whispers, while the profile tab is where you manage and adjust account settings.
Another new visual change is the plus button in the nav bar. This will sit right in the middle of all the other icons. And as you may have surmised, it’s the button for going live, posting stories, and getting to your dashboard. The new design is live for some but it’s on a continuous rollout. So check your app to see if there’s an update and if not, just sit tight as it should pop up before too long.