Twitter is very slow in India, even on latest iPhones: Elon Musk

Elon Musk is convinced that Twitter’s Android app is very slow in countries such as India, Indonesia and he’s determined to fix it. The billionaire’s remarks on Twitter’s performance on Android have also triggered controversy. He was called out by Twitter employees numerous times over the past week, including some of the Android app engineers who said Musk’s assessment was in accurate. But Musk is in no mood to take criticism and has fired engineers who challenged him on the platform. Another report by the Platformer says that even those who joked about their new boss on official chats on Slack have been sacked.

Coming to the Android app, Musk tweeted that the platform was not functioning at the level it should in many regions of the world. He said that the Twitter is much slower in regions like India and Indonesia compared to the app’s functioning in the US. “Twitter refreshes in about 2 seconds in the US, compared to India where it could take about 10 to 20 seconds,” he wrote.

The new Twitter CEO says this is could be due to ‘bad batching/verbose comms’.

“There are ~1200 “microservices” server side, of which ~40 are critical to Twitter working at all, according to server control team,” Musk adds in a later tweet, replying to former Meta CTO Mike Schroepfer (@schrep). He also wrote that the app was slow even on the latest iPhone in India and many other countries.

Schroepfer had previously questioned Musk’s ‘1200 RPCs’ claim as the main culprit of slowing down Twitter in many countries. For the uninitiated, an RPC (Remote Procedure Call) is a software communication protocol that allows apps like Twitter to request service from another computer over a connected network.

“Trimming down that 1200 number, reducing data usage, serializsd trips & simplifying app are all needed to improve speed of use,” Musk adds. In yet another tweet, Musk also suggests that there are parts of the world where a refresh on Twitter could take up to 30 seconds.

Several Android developers and coders outside of Twitter have also countered Musk’s claims, pointing out that other factors like ‘edge caching’ and ‘service availability’ could be influencing the speed of apps like Twitter in regions like India. Meanwhile, it looks like Musk is doubling down against the criticism for firing employees who questioned him. He wrote on as a reply to one tweet, “I would like to apologize for firing these geniuses. Their immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere.”