For extremely generous definitions of "works." I am constantly amazed at how long (and how many attempts) it often takes to load a single tweet page. The SPA-initializing state is usually measured in minutes on my iphone regardless of what kind of connection I'm on, and the result is often that message that the page failed to load because my browser made too many attempts. I don't know how you can possibly do this badly at delivering what should be the smallest web pages ever.
My standard practice on mobile now is, no joke, take the URL of the tweet page I'd like to read and paste it into a new FB post because it's faster and more reliable to get FB to fetch preview the content than it is to load it with my own browser. (edit: and note this is while using FB in my mobile browser. Think about how much more complicated a FB page should be than a single tweet, and it's still 100x faster to load.)
I've come to the conclusion that this is very intentional because they'd really like me to install the app and therefore have no incentive to improve the mobile experience, but I absolutely will not install an app for content that could very easily be delivered as a simple web page. I hope the trend of companies pushing their apps hard eventually reverses.
I just loaded a link to a tweet in a private browsing window on my iPhone in some sub-second amount of time. So whatever issue you're running into is a bug, not intentional.
Interesting how different our experiences are. This is a two-month old iphone, fully patched and with very few apps installed. Same experience as my previous iphone and android phones. Just verified: I sat and watched the "loading" spinner for over three minutes before starting to write this response. No idea how long it actually took, but it finished with just a blank white page with a twitter logo and a search bar. Maybe it's my mobile network (AT&T), who knows. But the experience is basically unusable, and I see at least one other person in this thread mentioning the error that indicates requests are being throttled, so I know I'm not alone.
I get frequent failures for various reasons on multiple connection types, including Google Fiber. Referrer seems to be part of it. Mobile does seem much worse (WiFi or cell network) which makes it feel intentional.
The mobile website's been broken for me for something like a year. It just shows "Something went wrong" with a Try again button that doesn't do anything. This happens for me on two different iPhones (a 6S and a XS).
My standard practice on mobile now is, no joke, take the URL of the tweet page I'd like to read and paste it into a new FB post because it's faster and more reliable to get FB to fetch preview the content than it is to load it with my own browser. (edit: and note this is while using FB in my mobile browser. Think about how much more complicated a FB page should be than a single tweet, and it's still 100x faster to load.)
I've come to the conclusion that this is very intentional because they'd really like me to install the app and therefore have no incentive to improve the mobile experience, but I absolutely will not install an app for content that could very easily be delivered as a simple web page. I hope the trend of companies pushing their apps hard eventually reverses.