Soon enough, we’ll get to watch Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump yell at each other (well, Trump will be yelling) on stage during U.S. Presidential debates. But in the meantime, there’s an app that captures their Twitter back-and-forth.
Elections 16, which quietly hit the Apple App Store (AAPL) a month ago, aggregates the two candidates’ tweets into one neat feed that looks like they’re sending SMS or chat messages to each other. It also includes a feed of politics-related tweets from media outlets as well as search tab to find more elections tweets.
This isn’t the first year that Twitter has played a notable role in the U.S. Presidential race. But it has certainly taken on a new role when it comes to candidates making their case against their opponents, largely thanks to Trump’s unfiltered tweets.
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“While the candidates aren’t directly conversing with each other they are attacking speeches the other made or their opinions / comments / remarks,” Aashish Patil, who built the app as a fun side project, told Coins2Day via email. “In that sense they are conversing with each other through twitter. It is as an ongoing debate.”
Of course, Twitter users can get a similar effect by creating a list with just the two candidate’s accounts, which will display their tweets in chronological order, as this app does. But Elections 16’s design makes it look like they’re sending messages to each other, which is both symbolic and just funny to imagine.
Patil, who is a mobile experience product lead at EMC (EMC) and builds other apps in his spare time, says he doesn’t have current plans to turn the app into a serious business. He built the app in a couple of weekends.
The app is free and available on iOS, and users are required to sign up using their Twitter (TWTR) accounts. Patil says this made it easier for him to build the app and stick to Twitter’s requirements for developers, although it would have been more beneficial to Twitter if it wasn’t requirement.
“Elections is a topic that can attract non twitter users too,” he says in a nod to the company’s long battle to keep adding new users.
Mobile apps have played an increasing role in this year’s U.S. Presidential election. Clinton’s campaign released an app this weekend aimed at her campaign volunteers with incentives to attend rallies and other forms of participation.