Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Twitter Shuts Down TweetDeck For Android, iPhone And AIR, Discontinues TweetDeck’s Facebook Integration

The link to the full story is here



TweetDeck, the feature-rich Twitter client that Twitter acquired in 2011, will soon mostly exist as a web-based service, and the native Mac and Windows apps will play second fiddle to the web and Chrome apps. The company is shutting down the AIR-based version of TweetDeck for desktop and will remove the Android and iPhone apps from their respective mobile stores in May. In addition, the TweetDeck team announced today, it will also “discontinue support for our Facebook integration.”

TweetDeck will continue to support its native apps for Mac and Windows, but the clear focus will be on the web and Chrome apps, which, the team writes, will “provide the best TweetDeck experience yet.” The web-based apps will also be the first to get new features, “followed closely by [the] Mac and PC apps.” Given the clear focus on the web apps, it may just be a matter of time before the native apps will also get the ax.

Twitter clearly remains committed to TweetDeck as a tool for power users, and today’s announcement notes that the team doubled in size over the past six months. Most users already use TweetDeck on their desktops and Twitter on mobile. The current versions of TweetDeck for AIR, iPhone and Android still use version 1.0 of Twitter’s API, which is about to be retired over the next few weeks. The apps Twitter is retiring today haven’t been updated in a long time, so in some ways, the writing was already on the wall for them anyway.

The discontinued support for the Facebook integration is only mentioned in one sentence in the announcement (“We’ll also discontinue support for our Facebook integration”), but we have asked Twitter for more details about this and will update this post once we hear more.

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