Are Twitter notifications not relevant to you? Worry not, Twitter just bought a company to fix them

Push notifications... and notifications, in general, are quite important for apps, especially social media ones. And we all know how annoying it is when Twitter randomly notifies you about someone's tweet, which is, at the same time, not that relevant to you. Well, Android Headlines now reports that the company is indeed working to improve its notifications experience... but, instead of dedicating a team to it (or whatever social media companies do in this case), Twitter went ahead and bought an entire company.

Twitter buys a company that should fix your notifications

Well, honestly speaking, it is not uncommon for a big company like Twitter to acquire a smaller company in order to enhance a specific area of the user experience it delivers. In this case, Twitter bought a company called OpenBack, and it should work to help deliver more relevant notifications to Twitter users.

So far, it is not known how exactly this acquisition will help enhance Twitter's notification experience, and we will have to wait and see what the results of it would be.

OpenBack: what is this company about?

You might be thinking that okay, Twitter bought a company, but what does this company actually do? In case you're wondering: OpenBack is basically an application that handles computations on the actual device of the owner and not on an online server. Pretty much, that is the more private and secure way to handle such operations.

However, Twitter has more pressing issues with notifications as well, such as them being irrelevant to you or distracting you, instead of engaging you to go back on Twitter. Due to the fact that Twitter's notifications are often found irrelevant, a lot of users turn them off or stand them for some time and then decide to turn them off. Twitter, understandably, doesn't want this as notifications are generally a way for the app to get you engaged again with it, making you open it up and look at what's going on.

It remains a mystery as to how OpenBack's on-device computational prowess will improve upon the relevancy of Twitter's notifications. One speculation that Android Headlines makes is that the tech behind OpenBack could use an on-device filter to hold notifications until the right way for you to receive them is, based on when you use the app.

But, as we already mentioned, there is still a long way before we get to see the effects of this acquisition in the way Twitter delivers notifications. Hopefully, it will work on giving you more control over what push notifications you want to see from the app, but we will see.

The price of the deal has not been publicly announced, so it is unclear how much Twitter paid to acquire OpenBack, but it could very well be millions or tens of millions of dollars.

Twitter has been trying hard to improve the user experience

It's not only notifications that Twitter wants to improve upon. Recently, the company introduced a fun way to create your own GIFs on the app for iOS, as well as a way to search in all of your direct messages to find the conversation you are looking for.