Timelines on tvOS?

[StreamLayer]

Hello!

I am trying to figure out how to display user timelines on a Apple TV (tvOS) application. I am not able to locate any documentation, so would welcome any guidance or suggestions from the community.

Thanks!

[andypiper]

The documentation on Twitter Kit for iOS is on Github here -> https://github.com/twitter/twitter-kit-ios/wiki

I’ve not personally attempted to build this into a tvOS app before, but I’m having a look into this now. I don’t know whether there would be any restrictions on using guest authorisation on tvOS to display a timeline. Have you tried including TwitterKit and TwitterCore into a tvOS app?

[StreamLayer]

Thanks, Andy. And yes, we tried including TwitterKit, but didn’t have much within the tvOS environment. But we can give it another shot over the weekend. We’re able to display Twitter timelines in our mobile experience, but for some reason, doing the same within our AppleTV experience is proving to be a challenge. We’ll give it another shot and let you know how it goes.

Have a great weekend!

[andypiper]

Thanks, would be curious to know what errors or issues (if any) you are seeing reported in the simulator or XCode. I’m going to give this a try over the next few days and see what I can build. Twitter Kit is open source, so if you are able to find specific issues that block tvOS usage, you can raise an issue on Github for others to contribute - but of course the simpler this can be made, the better.

[StreamLayer]

Will do. Thanks, Andy! We’ll keep you posted and also look forward to any feedback you might have after investigating further on your end.

Cheers!

[StreamLayer]

By the way – if helpful – here is the error message we’ve been seeing.

[!] The platform of the target Twitter (tvOS 11.2) is not compatible with TwitterKit (3.3.0), which does not support tvos.

[!] Automatically assigning platform tvos with version 11.2 on target Twitter because no platform was specified. Please specify a platform for this target in your Podfile. See https://guides.cocoapods.org/syntax/podfile.html#platform

[StreamLayer]

[andypiper]

Yeah I’m currently seeing the same, and looking into possible workarounds. It may simply be that unfortunately Twitter Kit is not compatible with tvOS, so that would be a dead end; as would be our Twitter for Websites timeline embeds; so it might require a third party solution like STTwitter with some manual work to build the Tweet displays. I’ve seen a number of tvOS apps that do present Tweets on screen, but I’ve not looked into how they are built.

I’ll let you know what I learn, likely early next week. Thanks.

[StreamLayer]

Thanks, Andy! Will look forward to any thoughts or workaround ideas you might discover.

[StreamLayer]

Hi Andy,

I was just following-up on our exchange last week, to see if you’ve come across any solutions or possible workarounds for the subject tvOS problem.

We appreciate your help and will look forward to hearing from you.

Best,

John

[andypiper]

Hi John.

Looks like TwitterCore is tvOS capable, but TwitterKit itself is not. From a pure timeline embedding perspective (without Auth, which would require a web view which is not available on tvOS AIUI) there’s a possibility of recompiling the OSS Twitter Kit code to support this. However, I’ve not had a chance to go down this route myself. Depending on how interested you are in pursuing this, you might want to take a look at the project on Github.

[StreamLayer]

Thanks, Andy. Much appreciated. Which specific Github project are you referring to?

Thanks again!

John

[andypiper]

twitter/twitter-kit-ios