robertodoering / harpy

a Twitter app built with Flutter 🦅

a feature rich Twitter experience built with Flutter

harpy is no longer in active development after Twitter's decision to disallow third party Twitter clients.

harpy was available in the Play Store as a free and paid app and was used by over 75.000 active users.

Check out a walkthrough of the app on youtube here

More images

Home	Media timeline	Theme selection
Menu	Trends	Tweet search filter

About

harpy is an alternative Twitter client that focuses on a nice user experience with unique features.

This project has been in development since late 2018 and aims to be a good example for a medium-large sized Flutter app with a focus on code quality and maintainability.

Some interesting features of the app include:

• riverpod
  • for state management using the included state_notifier
  • for dependency injection / service locators with easily mockable dependencies
• go_router for routing with support for Twitter url deeplinks
• sentry as an online error tracking service to report unhandled exceptions
• Fully featured theme customization
• Fully featured video player using the video_player package
• My own twitter_api package to make use of the official Twitter api
• A 'pro' and 'free' android product flavor
• Many customized animations sprinkled around the app, including custom logo animations created with Rive

Development / Setup

Follow the project setup for building harpy instructions to get the project running.

harpy's Issues

Quotes are not shown for retweeted tweets

Tweet list doesn't load automatically during the initial login.

When logging into the app for the first time the home timeline does not load the tweets.

Clicking on a quote should open the quoted tweet and load its replies

Add flag to disable caching of images in tweets

When showing the replies to a tweet there is no need to cache the user / media images.

Add a shimmer animation when loading a TweetList

The package:shimmer can be used instead of a CircularProgressIndicator while initially loading the Tweets for the list.
For the HomeTimeline, UserTimeline and TweetRepliesScreen

Add an app icon

An icon for the free and pro version of Harpy.
The icon can also be used in the EntryScreen to show when the app opens.

Handle entities in translated text

When translating text the entities should be parsed properly and the media / quote url should get removed.

Implement about screen

Setting for default video and image quality

The default video and image quality should be able to be changed in the settings.

A click on a user's avatar or profile banner should open the image in fullscreen

Only in the user profile screen.

Just like images in tweet media open in a fullscreen image gallery.

Initialization screen

When opening the app for the first time, the user should be greeted in a screen where they can set up their app and change the theme and ultimately log into their twitter account.
The default selected theme should be the light theme or the dark theme depending on the os setting.

Button for registering a twitter account in the login view

Can just direct to the twitter.com registration page in a webview in the login screen next to the login button

Refactor cache

Using a nosql database will improve performance and be allow for migrating to a new version.

Currently duplicate tweets that exist for a user and the home timeline are cached separately.
Instead all tweets should be cached together and only the ids of the home timeline and the user timelines should be cached and used to retrieve the tweets.

Fix video player play / pause button opacity animation

A flutter update seems to have broken the animation.

Setting to hide media by default / only if on mobile data

When set to true the media in the tweet tile should be collapsed by default.
Additionally it can be set to only collapse it when the user is using mobile data to prevent additional data consumption.

Quoted tweets can cause problems when cut off

If the quoted tweet text contains a multi character emoji at the position it is cut off, it throws an "unformatted utf16" exception and causes the list to not render any subsequent tweets.

Setup auto email handler for catcher

When a user sends a report, it should automatically be sent via email.
The credentials should be loaded through a file similar to the api keys.

Add custom loading animation

Instead of the CircularProgressIndicator

Consider using provider instead of scoped_model

https://pub.dev/packages/provider

Quotes should also be translated when translating a tweet with a quote

Fix actions not showing in tweet content if the tweet has a quoted tweet

Add pro version dialog

A dialog that is displayed when attempting to use a pro-version feature

Update the setup screen layout to be the same as the login screen with auto scaling text

After adding the animated Harpy logo to the login screen, the layout changed to be different from the setup screen, even though they should be the same.
Additionally the package:auto_size_text can be used to make sure the user name scales according to the available space (like the Harpy logo in to login screen).
The auto size text could also be used in the UserProfileScreen and other places for the user name.

Show in-app mentions notifications & Implement mentions timeline

• Visible as a tab in the home screen (todo: with #297)
• Contains number of new mentions since last visit
  • Won't show any on first open
• Notifications screen shows the mentions timeline for the authenticated user
• Mentions timeline is fetched upon app start to get number of new mentions
• Visiting the mentions timeline reduces the number to 0

Nice to have:

• Also show mentions timeline when the user opens their own profile
• Scroll to the last read mention when opening mentions timeline with new mentions

Refactor media player + image gallery

The media player and image gallery for Twitter Media needs to be refactored and improved.

New features & changes include:

• hide media on background click
• better image gallery gestures
  • swiping right while zoomed in should show the next image in the gallery
• better video ui
• video quality settings
• tweet actions if space is available
• fix media player aspect ratio in tweet tile

Button to scroll to the top of the timeline

Maybe a FloatingActionButton that only shows when the user is not at the top and is currently scrolling up.

Update UI, themes and icons

Implement a user search

Make sure notifyListeners() is not called after a ChangeNotifier has been disposed

When an async tasks in a ChangeNotifier completes we need to make sure it hasn't been disposed before notifyListiners is called.
Example: open user profile and immediately go back.

Maybe don't use ChangeNotifier when asynchronous tasks are involved.

Calling notifyListeners doesn't break anything, it only fails an assert for debug builds but it should be best practice to avoid it.

Setting to autoplay videos and gifs + only when connected to wifi

When set to true videos and gifs will automatically start playing when scrolling through the timeline.
Additionally it should allow to only autoplay when connected to wifi.

Should be on but only when connected to wifi initially.

Media player needs to be refactored for this option to get implemented fully.

Better api error handling with timeouts

Display tweet responses together

If a tweet in the list of tweets is a reply to another tweet in the list, display them together below each other.

Implement a list of followed & following users for any user

Automatically refresh home timeline tweets

While showing the home timeline, periodic requests with a filter to only request new tweets can automatically be added to the list.
Similarly to the official twitter app, when not on the top of the list an element can notify for new tweets.

Media image hero tags should be different for each tweet lists

When transitioning from the UserScreen or RepliesScreen to the HomeScreen, the media images shouldn't have a hero animation.

Fix image viewer swipe to dismiss not always working

Additionally enable support to swipe both up and down to dismiss an image.

Implement Harpy Pro screen

Changing accounts doesn't clear home timeline tweet list

When logging into a different account the home timeline will display the old tweets while the new tweets are loading.

Add a custom animation for the parent Tweet when showing the replies

When tapping on a Tweet to show its replies, if the Tweet itself is a reply and the parent is shown above it, it should be animated into the list.

Add tests

Composing a tweet

You should be able to tweet and reply to existing tweets.
Also you need to be able to upload images/gifs and videos to append to your tweet.

Refactor services & service provider

Using package:get_it for dependency injection makes the code more readable and maintainable

Duplicate global key when opening user profile when a recent tweet contains a media player

If one of the most recent tweets of the user contains a media player and is showing in the home timeline while opening the profile 2 of the same duplicate key exist in the same widget tree.

Media player should be refactored before this is fixed.

Keep home timeline tweet list position cross-session

When exiting the app, the list should be at the same tweet where it was before, then update and notify the user for new tweets at the top.

Maybe useful:
https://docs.flutter.io/flutter/widgets/ScrollNotification-class.html

Back button icon color in UserProfileScreen should respect the user profile banner color

Maybe the pallete_generator package can be used to get the complimentary color for the user banner.

Or maybe just add a slightly translucent backdrop for the button (like the CircularButton)

Add paginated requests for tweet replies

Additionally the parent tweet should show before the first response has been received.

Change name of user in UserProfileScreen to softwrap when its too long.

It should act similar to the name in the UserTile.

Favorite animation gets replayed on every build

Verified icon in Tweet Tile

An icon next to the name should show whether or not a user is verified.

Show replies to a particular Tweet

When clicking on a tweet in the list it should load and show replies to that tweet.

This isn't supported by the twitter api but can be worked around by using the tweet search api.
Implementation in a python lib: https://gist.github.com/edsu/54e6f7d63df3866a87a15aed17b51eaf#file-replies-py-L6