In July 2011, some of you out there may remember we published an article in which we asked the question: ‘Was TweetDeck For iPad Killed?’
Of course, at that time it was just conjecture — and, (despite our best efforts), we never really got to the bottom of what happened to TweetDeck for iPad. “Surely the widely-used, multi-column iPad Twitter client wasn’t that bad, that it deserved to be pulled from the App Store just over a year after its initial debut?,” we thought to ourselves.
Strangely, it was.
In an announcement made by Twitter, (who acquired the client for itself in mid-2011), on the Official TweetDeck Posterous Blog this week, however, the company confirmed that it would be dropping all support for TweetDeck AIR, TweetDeck for Android and TweetDeck for iPhone, this May.
The announcement arrives after the company explained it has spent the last 18-months “focused on building a fast and feature-rich web application for modern browsers,” alongside developing a “Chrome app,” which, it says, offers some unique features like “notifications.”
“We’ve recently introduced many enhancements to these apps –– a new look and feel, tools like search term autocomplete and search filters to help you find what you’re looking for more quickly, and automatically-updating Tweet streams so you immediately see the most recent Tweets,” the company wrote.
“Our weekly web releases have been possible because we’ve nearly doubled the size of the TweetDeck team over the past six months (and we’re still hiring).”
In many ways, Twitter notes that discontinuing this app support is a “reflection of where [its] TweetDeck power-users are going.” The company revealed that over the past few years they’ve seen a steady trend towards people using TweetDeck on their computers, and using Twitter on their mobile devices.
“This trend coincides with an increased investment in Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android –– adding photo filters and other editing capabilities, revamping user profiles and enhancing search,” wrote the firm.
For those of you who will inevitably be inconvenienced by this shift, the company offered its “sincere apologies,” adding that – (as a direct result of this shift) – over the next two months users of TweetDeck AIR, TweetDeck for Android and TweetDeck for iPhone “may experience some outages,” before the aforementioned apps are removed completely from their respective app stores in early May.
As of writing, TweetDeck can still be downloaded as a working Twitter client from both the iTunes App Store, Google Play and the Mac App Store.
Ironically, Twitter (who acquired blogging platform Posterous in May of last year), has also announced this week that it is retiring that, too — the very platform it used to announce it was discontinuing the above TweetDeck apps.
The company wrote:
“On April 30th, we will turn off posterous.com and our mobile apps in order to focus 100% of our efforts on Twitter. This means that as of April 30, Posterous Spaces will no longer be available either to view or to edit.”
Starting today, Posterous.com account holders can request a backup of all their posts made on the service by heading to posterous.com/#backup and following the instructions provided.
/ TweetDeck (Posterous)
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