Twitter is struggling to keep a healthy growth rate, and Apple obviously has not been doing much to help.
Twitter has lost four million users last quarter because of Apple’s roll-out of iOS 8, according to Twitter executives Thursday.
Some three million of those users were lost due to a change to the Shared Links feature of the mobile Safari browser, which presents links from people’s Twitter followers. The other million were “Twitter-owned,” CFO Anthony Noto expressed during Twitter’s earnings call, without further explanation.
The vague remarks confused some people on Twitter’s quarterly earnings call. “It doesn’t make any sense to me,” tweeted Mark Gurman, senior editor at Apple news site 9to5Mac.
;ater CEO Dick Costollo told Business Insider that the one million users it lost failed to get their passwords valid because of an encryption issue concerned with Twitter integration to iOS.
Four million isn’t a large number to Twitter, which had 288 million users at the end of last quarter. However, Twitter is fighting to keep its historic growth even without the Apple glitch. It had more than 20 percent of users last quarter than by the end of 2013, the lowest growth rate it’s already reported.
During its earnings call, Costollo referred to the issue as an “unforeseen bug in iOS 8 as it concerns Twitter’s integration with the OS.” He added that Twitter enjoys a “great relationship with Apple.”
