Twitter had an XMPP gateway to send tweets. They were never built on XMPP. Google still uses XMPP. On Android phones this isn't exposed as a service to other a

Twitter had an XMPP gateway to send tweets. They were never built on XMPP. Google still uses XMPP. On Android phones this isn't exposed as a service to other apps (if you want that, use Rene Treffer's excellent https://github.com/rtreffer/AsmackService https://github.com/rtreffer/AsmackService). Android's XMPP bits use a proprietary binary protocol to communicate with their XMPP server farm. Probably to reduce power consumption. You can still use any 3rd party XMPP client to connect into google's XMPP cloud.