Today, Twitter has made an announcement that they will stop supporting TweetDeck apps for iPhone, Android and AIR. The iPhone and Android apps have been ignored for a while now, with the Android app not getting an update for over a year now. TweetDeck will now concentrate on supporting only the Mac, PC, web and Chrome App versions. The mobile apps are running on their API v1.0 which is scheduled to be retired.
The big blow for TweetDeck users will be the discontinuation of Facebook integration. This was useful for users who could quickly got through updates on Twitter and Facebook from TweetDeck and also post on both social networks.
Twitter’s Problems
Almost two years ago, when Twitter bought TweetDeck, I had predicted that Twitter will at some stage end up killing it. The prediction seems to be panning out slowly but surely now. I am all for change but despite owning TweetDeck, Twitter has not learnt much from it. Their current Twitter apps for iOS and Android are literally a copy of their web UI. The worse part of it, is the lack of a feature which allows users to slide through lists (like we could on TweetDeck).
Twitter on the other hand has not been the most friendly towards 3rd party developers either. They have systematically gone about killing 3rd party apps by introducing API guidelines that restricted App to have only 100,000 active users at a time. This practically made it very difficult for several apps like say Twimbow to continue.
Were you using TweetDeck on iOS or Android? Do drop in your comments and views.
2 Comments
So they basically just made an Officially announcement of what they have been doing for a while now, further I think they should seriously consider an iPad only app like the ones they have for the mac… I use the web version on my iPad but it’s a little too sluggish.
@Alex: Yes the iOS and Android disengagement was not unexpected. The disappointing thing for some will be the lack of FB integration.