Limerino 1.1.3 — Native video, a new app icon, and Siri

Live streams play in Limerino’s own player now, the app icon is a brighter glass bubble with a centred face, and Siri, Spotlight, Shortcuts, Control Center and the Home Screen can all reach your channels.

A native live player. Tap Watch and the stream plays in Limerino itself rather than in a web page, at Twitch’s low-latency setting, with sound as soon as the picture arrives. Tap the video for play, pause and mute, and a quality button offering Auto plus whatever the channel is broadcasting; the buffer adapts to your connection, holding very low latency on a good link, backing off after a stall and easing back once the stream has been steady for a while. Video starts only when you tap Watch, and Close video really stops it. Twitch’s embedded player is still there, under Settings › Video › Player type, for anyone who wants it. Ads play as Twitch serves them.

A new app icon. The lavender glass speech bubble is a real three-dimensional object now instead of a generated picture: crisp edges, clean highlights, a clearer face and a centred silhouette. On iOS 26 and iOS 27 it is built from layers, so the Home Screen’s Dark, Clear and Tinted styles each get a proper version of their own; on iOS 18 it arrives with the system’s standard edge treatment and matching Dark and Tinted variants.

Siri, Spotlight, Shortcuts and the Home Screen. Ask Siri to open or watch a channel by name, or to show your live favorites. Channels you have opened appear in Spotlight, and the Shortcuts app lists every action. A Favorite Channel widget shows whether one channel is live, Control Center gains Resume watching and Open favorites, and Handoff carries the channel you are viewing to twitch.tv on a Mac. One switch — Settings › Device › Siri & Search, on by default — controls what Limerino offers Siri, Spotlight and Shortcuts, and turning it off takes back what it had already put there. Your widget, the Control Center tiles and Handoff are yours rather than a system index, so they keep working; signing out clears them.

GIFs sent in chat. Twitch added a GIF feature to chat, and Limerino shows them: a GIF sent by a Tier 2 or Tier 3 subscriber arrives as a card under the message and plays there, and tapping it opens the GIF at full size with its caption, a Share and Copy link bar, and a swipe down back to chat. Long-press a message carrying one for View GIF and Copy GIF link. One switch under Settings › Emote & badge display turns the cards off, and your motion settings are honoured throughout.

Moderation that states itself. A timeout or a ban is written into chat as a plain line that scrolls away with the conversation, repeats collapsed into one line with a count, and it shows even with Hide deleted messages on. A moderator’s warning no longer looks like a message that went out: your refused message says “Not sent” straight away, and chat explains that the warning has to be acknowledged on Twitch before you can chat in that channel again. Lead moderators keep every power Twitch gave them, and the commands that used to insist you must be the broadcaster answer honestly.

Chat that keeps its place. Messages no longer slide down and snap back while you read older chat, an emote message leaves no blank band above the message box, gift, sub and watch-streak notices show their whole text, the reply pane keeps the message you tapped in view, a timed-out message keeps its line, and badges sit level with the name.

Launch, history and bots. The crash that closed the app on some iPhones before the first screen drew is fixed, and the shape that caused it is now measured on every build so it cannot creep back. Coming back after a few minutes in another app no longer leaves a hole in your chat history, and bot messages that rendered as a single word show their whole line.

Also. Put your channels in the order you want. 7TV personal emotes drawn natively. Your own slash commands at the head of the “/” list, and a Custom commands form that says what it needs. Whisper drafts that survive a drag down.

Plus a run of repairs across landscape, name paints, video panels at larger text sizes, follow history and accessibility, most of them reported by people using the app.

The native player, in detail. Until now Watch loaded Twitch’s web player inside the app. Limerino plays the stream itself now: the channel preview stays up with a “Connecting…” note, then dissolves into live video, and a small readout under the picture shows how far behind the broadcaster you are. Tap the video and the controls appear — play, pause, mute, a spinner while the stream connects or rebuffers — and hide themselves again after a few seconds. The quality button lists Auto plus whatever the channel is broadcasting; your pick sticks, the audio-only option is called “Audio only”, two options with the same name are told apart by their bit rate, and quality is locked while an ad plays. Ads play as Twitch serves them.

A buffer that adapts, and a player that says when it fails. The player keeps the very low latency a good connection allows, backs off a little after a stall, and eases back toward low latency once the stream has been stable for a while. Your own pauses are no longer treated as trouble: opening Settings or a clip, taking a call or tapping Pause used to leave it buffering cautiously for a minute and a half afterwards. When playback does fail, the player tries once more on its own, and if that fails it shows a card that names the problem and offers both Retry and Twitch’s embedded player — your choice, not a silent swap — where it used to hand the stream over quietly and say nothing. Closing a clip or a past broadcast brings the live stream back instead of leaving a dead pane, and signing out stops the stream.

Where the choice lives. The native player is the standard, and Twitch’s embedded player is a choice under Settings › Video › Player type for anyone who prefers it; a choice you had already made there is kept. Video starts only when you ask for it: opening a channel shows the poster with Watch, returning to the app resumes a stream you had started, and it never starts one you had not. Close video really stops the player, with no sound continuing after it, and opening a clip or a past broadcast while live video plays stops the live sound the moment it opens. With VoiceOver the video is one element, “Live video”; “Stream started” is spoken when playback begins, Magic Tap pauses and resumes, the quality list arriving is announced, and the controls no longer pull the VoiceOver cursor onto a button you did not touch.

Siri, Spotlight, Shortcuts, Control Center and Handoff, in detail. Ask Siri to open a channel, to watch one, or to show the channels of yours that are live; channels you have opened appear in Spotlight, and the Shortcuts app lists every action so you can build your own. A Favorite Channel widget on the Home Screen says whether one channel is live. Control Center gains Resume watching and Open favorites. Handoff carries the channel you are viewing to twitch.tv on a Mac. Everything Limerino publishes to Siri, Spotlight and Shortcuts is governed by a single switch, Settings › Device › Siri & Search, on by default: turn it off and what is already there is taken back. The widget, the Control Center tiles and Handoff are your own surfaces rather than a system index, so they carry on; signing out clears those as well. The first Limerino phrase you say asks whether to turn the app’s shortcuts on; accept it, or Siri answers from general knowledge instead of from the app.

The icon, in detail. The mark is the same lavender glass speech bubble with two eyes on a violet field, rendered as a real object rather than generated: no noise around the eyes or the rim, and a face that reads at Home Screen size. The silhouette is centred, which is what makes the Clear and Tinted treatments sit straight. On iOS 26 and iOS 27 the icon is built from layers so Default, Dark, Clear and Tinted each get a proper version at both icon sizes; on iOS 18 you get Light, Dark and Tinted. iOS may keep showing the previous icon for a short while after an update until the Home Screen refreshes; a restart clears it.

GIFs, in detail. A GIF appears as a card under the message that carried it and plays there. Tap the card, or choose View GIF from the message’s actions, and it opens at full size with its caption; share it, copy its link or open it in the browser from the bar along the bottom, and Done or a swipe down brings chat back exactly where you left it. Each streamer chooses whether their own channel allows GIFs, so a channel with none in it is normal rather than a sign something is broken. Settings › Emote & badge display › Show GIFs sent in chat is on unless you turn it off; with it off a GIF arrives as the short description Twitch sends with it, shown as ordinary text, so nothing in the conversation goes missing. The cards follow the motion settings you already have: with Animate emotes and name colors off, or with iOS set to dim flashing lights or to stop animated images playing by themselves, a card holds still on its first frame with a Play button. Only GIFs you can actually see play at all, and they stop while a sheet covers chat.

Moderation, in detail. When a moderator times someone out or bans them, a plain line appears at the bottom of chat — “name has been timed out for 10m.” — and scrolls away with the conversation; repeats collapse into one line with a count, and it shows even with Hide deleted messages on, which used to leave a timeout stated nowhere at all. If a moderator warns you, your next message is refused by Twitch: it now shows “Not sent” at once instead of looking sent, chat says the warning has to be acknowledged on Twitch first, and VoiceOver speaks it. Lead moderators keep every moderator power they hold, and the moderator and VIP commands answer honestly rather than claiming you must be the broadcaster; the broadcaster gets Add and Remove moderator and Add and Remove VIP on a chatter’s profile card, while a lead moderator sees those rows with a handoff to Twitch, because Twitch keeps that one step for its own site and app. Moderators also get a timeout notice that counts once however many times the same notification arrives, and a retried message that starts fresh instead of carrying the crossed-out look of the send before it.

Chat that holds still, in detail. In a fast-moving chat, scrolling up to read and then stopping could make the messages in front of you slide down for a split second and snap back each time new ones arrived. To keep your place as older messages leave the top of a full chat, Limerino shifts the view by the same amount, and that shift was reaching the screen a moment before the change it was making up for; the two land together now. Accepting an emote suggestion, sending, or cancelling a message used to leave an empty band between chat and the message box for a second or so — chat sits back on the message box the moment the message goes, and it no longer stays lifted by the height of the suggestion bar until the keyboard goes down. Tapping a mention or a reply scrolls to that message and keeps it in view when the reply pane opens over it, when the keyboard comes or goes, and through a rotation. Scrolled up in a busy chat with the reply bar open, the messages you were reading no longer flicker or step as new ones arrive. A message greyed by a timeout keeps its strike and its “Timed out for 10m” line when older chat loads in behind it, and the line paints in the same instant as the strike. Longer gift, sub and watch-streak notices wrap to their full length instead of being cut off after two lines, and VoiceOver reads them. Badges, and the Shared Chat avatar that leads them, sit centred on the name at every badge size.

Launch, history and bots, in detail. On a few phones the app died before its first screen drew. The way the main chat screen was assembled made iOS walk a very deep type description on the tightest part of the launch stack; that is now measured on every build and pinned so it cannot creep back, and a cold-launch check runs against the shipping configuration rather than a debug one. Coming back to a busy chat after a few minutes in another app could leave a hole in the history, and a late-arriving older message could land out of order below the marker where live chat begins: Limerino now notices when its first catch-up came up short and loads the rest, slots a late message where it belongs, and strikes it if a deletion or timeout lands while it is still being slotted. Bot lines that start with an invisible anti-ping character — announcement and commit messages among them — rendered as a single word such as “events”; the whole line now shows, and a /me line from a bot renders as a proper action again, the name in its colour, the text in italics, no colon.

Your channels, in the order you want. In the channel switcher, touch and hold the three short lines at the start of a row, then drag it up or down. Open channels and Favorites each keep their own order, and it sticks after a relaunch; hold a row near the top or bottom edge and the list scrolls for you. Every row’s long-press menu also has a Move option — up, down, to top, to bottom — and with VoiceOver the same four moves are on the Actions rotor, so no drag is ever required. Tapping, swiping, favoriting, splitting and closing work exactly as before, and dragging never switches, closes or unfavorites a channel. While you are searching, Open channels cannot be dragged, because search puts the closest matches first and a position there is the search’s rather than yours; the handles come back as soon as you clear the box. Favorites stay draggable while you search, because searching there only hides rows. Restoring your channels on launch now prefers the current record for each one, so an order you set is not undone by a leftover from a much older version.

Landscape. The button under the video that returns you to portrait answers a tap again, and nothing is painted behind it. With chat hidden, the divider goes away with the chat column and comes back with it, instead of leaving a thin light line near the edge of the picture. The controls under the video — Portrait, the chat toggle and the LIVE pill — sit on a flat dark surface rather than frosted glass, so nothing bands or smears behind them, and the bar animates when its buttons come and go instead of jumping. The chat panel’s width control is a real slider for VoiceOver, Switch Control and Voice Control, the width you drag to is the width that sticks, and the close button stays on screen while you drag.

A wave of smaller fixes, most from user reports.

• 7TV personal emotes render natively wherever chat is drawn — live chat, replies, the mentions feed, highlights, history and replay — and in nobody else’s messages; your own usable ones get a Personal section in the picker, in search and in autocomplete, under a switch that applies at once.
• Dragging down on a whisper conversation no longer dismisses it while a draft is present. Clear the draft and the sheet dismisses normally.
• The Custom commands add form says what it needs before Add lights up, shows an example in each field, announces its state to VoiceOver, and saves the message exactly as you typed it rather than letting the keyboard capitalise it.
• Typing “/” puts the shortcuts you saved in Settings first, in alphabetical order, each marked with a small command symbol, ahead of Twitch’s own commands.
• 7TV name-paint shadows carry the full chain the paint was designed with, on still and animated paints, wrapped names and mixed-script names alike, and the message text beside a painted name stays unshadowed.
• A painted name is centred on the profile card again, and in the paint picker’s preview and right-to-left layouts, rather than sitting to the right of the avatar.
• Removing a 7TV emote that a channel holds under two names removes the name that was actually removed and leaves the other copies alone; renames behave the same way, and the emote picker shows both names as two cells, as 7TV itself does.
• Poster titles, actions and the viewer count on the video panels have room to stay readable at larger text sizes, and the viewer count has a larger VoiceOver target.
• Your own follow history, and the broadcaster and moderator lookups Twitch permits, appear on user cards again; follow information Twitch will not give is left out rather than described as not following.
• Glass controls that ignored a tap under Increase Contrast and on iOS 18 answer again: the landscape chat toggle, the video poster, the theater-mode menu, the name on a reply or whisper header, the resend chip on a failed message, and the emote-suggestion chips.
• The player controls answer properly on slower phones: a thumb that lands a little wide of a button still counts, a tap while the controls are still appearing no longer dismisses them, the auto-hide timer starts only once they are on screen, and a refused Play, Pause or Mute buzzes and says why.
• A mention, thread reply or highlight that lands in the chat you are already looking at is recorded as read, so the inbox badge counts only what arrived while you were somewhere else.
• The message box no longer leaves a lit Send button on a message that cannot be sent.
• Coming back from a clip no longer reports the live stream unavailable over a stream that is plainly live, and tapping Watch straight after returning to the app starts the stream instead of failing instantly.
• On the smallest iPhones, a long channel name wraps onto a second line instead of being cut off by the new drag handle.

iPad is still iPhone-scaled.