Peregrine for Windows Phone review

Windows Phone has got a pretty consistent bunch of Twitter clients in the Marketplace, besides the official Twitter client. Some of them are paid-only, some of them have free versions but most of them make horrible use of the ads component. Or even worse, you won't even know your run an ad-supported version for a few launches. I don't know what the developers of those apps are thinking, but you can't force or annoy your clients into buying your product. Here's where Peregrine is different. Besides being a kick-ass Twitter client, it shows the user ads ONLY there is enough room for them to be displayed. It doesn't occupy half of your Timeline screen with a dog training ad, but it can display it when you're viewing someone's profile. I can guarantee that you'll never accidentally hit an ad like it happens with other apps.


The primary view of Peregrine consists in three panels: Timeline, Mentions and Messages. Each of these panels have pull-down to refresh functionality and on top of all of them there is a status display label that shows you the number of new tweets, mentions and messages for your account. As you can see from the screenshots there is no ad displayed in any of those panels.


The developer of Peregrine cleverly shows ads only where there is space for them, where they're not in your way, like in the profile panel, or in a tweet panel.

Peregrine only supports one Twitter account, but that should be enough for most users. The fact that the app is free and the non intrusive way the ads are displayed make Peregrine my preferred Twitter client.


Peregrine has what Windows Phone devs call a background agent that allows it to check for new tweets, mentions or messages even when the app is not launched. In the app settings you can define this behavior, you can turn on or off the background agent as well as choose which items should get updated when the agent runs. You can also choose which items you want to receive toast notifications for.

Peregrine has the ability to add URLs to an Instapaper account for later reading. I would have liked to have the options to have a Pocket account here too, but I guess that's the only downside of this app.


Trends are also supported by Peregrine and you can choose if you want to see the current, daily, weekly or local trends. You can add your current location to your tweets and you can also add photos from your phone's gallery.

I think Peregrine is one of the best Twitter clients for Windows Phone and definitely the best free one. Worth giving a try.