Elon Musk says he's getting rid of 'Twitter for iPhone' labels, which people used to catch Android brands and ambassadors tweeting from Apple devices

• Elon Musk says Twitter will get rid of source labels indicating the device a tweet was sent from.
• Twitter says on its help center that the labels help users "determine how much you trust the content."
• Some on Twitter have used the labels to catch tweets promoting Android phones sent from iPhones.

It may soon no longer be possible to spot when a tweet promoting an Android phone is sent by an iPhone.

Elon Musk, the new billionaire owner of Twitter, said on Monday that Twitter would get rid of the label on tweets specifying what kind of device they were sent from, such as an iPhone.

"And we will finally stop adding what device a tweet was written on (waste of screen space & compute) below every tweet," Musk tweeted. "Literally no one even knows why we did that …"

As Chance Miller, editor-in-chief of the Apple news website 9to5mac.com, noted on Twitter, the company got rid of the feature in 2012 but re-implemented it in 2018.

Twitter says that these source labels "help you better understand how a Tweet was posted."

"This additional information provides context about the Tweet and its author," Twitter's help center says. "If you don't recognize the source, you may want to learn more to determine how much you trust the content."

The feature has also been used to catch Android brand ambassadors tweeting from rival iPhones.

In 2018, Gal Gadot tweeted an ad for the Android phone, Huawei Mate 10 — from her iPhone, as pointed out at the time by Marques Brownlee, a YouTuber whose tech-focused channel has over 16 million subscribers.

That's not the only example of Android-related brands or ambassadors tweeting about the products from an iPhone:

• Last month, the Google Pixel Twitter account responded to a tweet by Apple CEO Tim Cook in what appeared to be a dig at the company. But the initial tweet, which was deleted, had the label "Twitter for iPhone."
• Last year, Samsung's US Twitter account tweeted a poll teasing the launch of a new product, but it was sent from an iPhone.
• A promotional tweet for the Android phone One Plus 7 Pro, from an influencer hired by T-Mobile, was sent from an iPhone in 2019.
• Singer Alicia Keys was once a celebrity ambassador for BlackBerry, and she had said that she had given up her iPhone in favor of a BlackBerry Z10. But she was caught tweeting from an iPhone.