About a month ago I wrote about how Grok is now free. And now to embrace that, Twitter (or xAi, because they're separate kinda) has released an app for the AI chatbot everyone loves to ignore. Currently, this app is only available on iOS, but I still decided to download it because why not.
Before I go any deeper, this is a review on the app itself. I don't care about the actual AI model, as I don't use Grok, and neither does anybody else. I haven't updated Twitter in long enough to have the Grok button.
And I'm sad to say this, but the Grok app is actually well designed, to the point it got annoying. Unlike the X TV app, this one works, and is native. There are 4 reasons I suspect on why this app is well designed:
- iOS has good APIs and features for development that make creation of good apps easy (which would explain why this app isn't on Android)
- Elon is doing what he does best: hiring people that do actually good work, and then Elon taking all the credit for it
- The development team found an open source template for the apps interface and never credited it
- The entire app was outsourced
Interface
When you launch the app, you will see suggested prompts, and the keyboard will be automatically selected. They definitely took a page from Arc Search's book here.
In terms of the interface when you're messaging, there isn't much to say. They basically copied the design of ChatGPT, but added their own touches. In fact, the design of most this app feels like ChatGPT with a different interface. This isn't a bad thing, I think the interface works for what it's supposed to do.
One thing that interested though was the menu for attachments:
The first thing to note is the carousel of recent images, which uses an API so that the app itself cannot see your photos until you select them. You can tell because of the hand icon shown in the top left of the carousel, added by Apple. I wasn't expecting this at all, especially from Twitter. But this whole menu feels like the iMessage attachment menu:
The thing that really shocked me was the sidebar:
You cannot see it, but there is a smooth blur effect when swiping into this page. The blue glow at the top isn't a blur from the previous page, but an animated glow. And when scrolling through the media panel, there is a 3D carousel effect when images are going off the screen (you can somewhat see it in the far left image). I really wasn't expecting this.
The roughest part of the app, which isn't even that bad, is the settings menu. And that's only because of some weird transitions between pages. The app has only a few settings, mainly appearance and disabling having the keyboard automatically appear on app launch.
Note: As I was writing this, they released the first app update, which added haptic feedback settings.
Other than that, there isn't really much else to talk about related to the design of this app. But one final thing I would like to bring up is privacy.
Privacy
Compared to the regular Twitter app, the Grok app barely uses any permissions. The only permission I had to accept was the camera for taking pictures. For everything else, native photo/file pickers are used, which is nice not just for privacy, but because they're good.
But looking at Apple's "app nutrition labels", you can see a clear difference between apps. This is the Grok app:
And here's the Twitter app:
I think it's clear who wins.
Conclusion
Although the Grok app has good design, I still don't care about using AI and I won't be using it. And even if I did care I still wouldn't use it, because why would I use an AI model created by Twitter?
Now that I'm done writing this article, I can finally delete this stupid app.