Twitter stops support for animated PNGs for various technical reasons

If you’re fond of sharing animated PNGs on Twitter, your happy days are finally over. The social network has announced that they have removed support for these types of images, although animated GIFs in general are still allowed. This change is for a pretty simple reason: a bug which let users upload multiple APNGs causes performance problems for both the app and the users’ devices as well. It can even cause some medical issues for those who have epilepsy and so better be safe for everyone than sorry.

Twitter says there was a bug that allowed users to add multiple APNGs to a single tweet when initially you could only add one. Because this kind of files ignore the Twitter safeguards, this meant that the app performance was affected and possibly also your device. The files would increase memory usage in your device, prompting both the app and maybe even your smartphone to crash.

People who suffer from epilepsy may also get triggered by the APNGs. They don’t follow Twitter’s default autoplay settings and so users will be exposed to the animation whether they wanted to or not. And if the animation has colors and movement that can trigger a seizure, then the unwitting user will be affected. These are probably reasons enough for us to understand why Twitter would remove support for such files.

Technically, you would still be able to upload animated PNGs. But the change to Twitter support means that they will no longer animate and so all you’ll see is a still, static image. They said they will eventually add an alt-text option for the GIFs that are still supported. This feature was available for the APNGs that is why some users preferred to use that for their tweet rather than the standard GIF.

Some users are of course still complaining about this but hopefully, they’ll eventually be satisfied with Twitter’s explanation. In the meantime, there are a lot of GIFs out there that you can enjoy anyway.