How to change back to the old Twitter app icon on iOS

As our Twitter apps are updating to now be called “X,” you might long for the old blue bird logo. It harkens back to a similar time, when Twitter certainly had its issues, but at least it was not owned by Elon Musk. Thanks to the shortcuts app on iOS, we can kid ourselves into believing that Twitter is still being run by a different short-sighted billionaire, rather than this even shorter-sighted one. Lucky us!

Here’s how you can change your X icon back to Twitter again:

On your iPhone, navigate to the Shortcuts app. If you have a newer iPhone, this should be pre-installed, but if not, you can find it in the App Store. So long as your iPhone is running iOS 12.0 or higher, you’re good to go.
From the main Shortcuts screen on the Shortcuts app, you’re going to tap — you guessed it — “All Shortcuts.”

Once you do that, hit the blue plus sign in the top right corner of your screen to set up a new Shortcut.
Shortcuts can be used for a whole bunch of stuff, but we’re keeping it simple here. You should see a suggested action of “Open App” to build your new shortcut. Tap that.
Now, you’ll be prompted to set up a new “Open App” shortcut. Next to where it says “Open,” click on “App” to search for the X app. Select that.
Once you’ve selected the “X” app, tap the share icon on the navigation bar at the bottom of your screen. This will bring up another menu, where you can select “Add to Home Screen.”
At last, here is where you can customize the name and icon for your Shortcut. Go ahead and type in Twitter instead of “Open App.” Then, tap the small Shortcut icon next to where you typed in Twitter.
Here, you can upload an image of the Twitter logo. But unless if you’re a really specific kind of person, you probably don’t have that already saved to your phone. Just Google “Twitter icon.” You’ll find one pretty quickly — we used this one.

And there you have it! You can now delude yourself that we are in a slightly less cursed timeline than the one in which Elon Musk has changed Twitter’s name to X, and the Twitter icon definitely doesn’t look like a porn app (which wouldn’t even get approved on the App Store, anyway!). Congratulations, y’all.