One more step in my X exit: replacing its Android app with a home-screen Web shorcut

Last week, X’s visible presence on my phone was an icon buried in the all-apps list, past where I’d usually scroll in that alphabetical index. This week, X’s icon is lodged next to the calendar widget on one of my home screens, ensuring I’m frequently reminded of that toxic platform. This is an overdue upgrade.

Uninstalling X’s Android app and replacing it with a Web shortcut was the latest step in a spiral of estrangement since Elon Musk began destroying the former Twitter’s value as a medium for real-time information and commentary.

First Musk’s paid membership scheme limited the reach of tweets from people who didn’t feel inclined to give the world’s richest man $8 a month while elevating some of the stupider people on the Internet into our replies. Then him inviting loathsome conspiracy liar Alex Jones back on terminated my own interest in supporting the platform with more free writing–leading to my switching to Bluesky as my primary public notebook.

Musk’s own descent into conspiracy lies led me to yank the app’s remaining permissions and turn off the notifications that had stopped enlightening me to useful activity on the platform. Seeing this tech oligarch then turn X, as the Washington Post’s Will Oremus put it, into a digital Mar-a-Lago that he rules as a two-bit tyrant left me realizing that I was starting to see the app as more of a threat than a distraction.

(The ransacking of the digital and HR infrastructure of multiple federal agencies by Musk and his minions–with him scoffing online while leaving humans abroad in the blast zone–has not improved my judgment of the unelected plutocrat who seems to think he’s starring in a buddy flick with President Trump.)

I do still have to read X as part of my job. But Android1 provides a safer way to use a service that you may no longer deem trustworthy: saving a home-screen shortcut to a site that looks and generally functions like an app.

But a Web-app shortcut benefits from the better security defenses of a browser–and, since I created this shortcut in Firefox for Android, it also gets stronger privacy protections than what Chrome for Android would provide. These make Web shortcuts a good harm-reduction option that more people should consider. So that’s how I now have an X icon badged with a small Firefox logo next to my calendar widget, since I can’t park a Web shortcut in the all-apps list.

All this is more than I can say for another short-form social app under the control of a different tech billionaire who made his own public conversion to Trump courtier: Meta’s Threads. I don’t have time for a vapid platform that, unlike Facebook and Instagram, doesn’t connect me to friends or family, so I deleted that app from my phone without bothering to save a Web shortcut. I don’t miss it.

Apple provides a similar Web-shortcut feature in iOS and iPadOS, but those operating systems also provide app-privacy protections unavailable in Android. That’s why I’ve yet to subject X’s iPad app to the same eviction as its Android app, although after writing this post I am leaning towards doing so. ↩︎

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