TweetDeck is rather an old Twitter app these days but it has survived the test of time because it’s incredibly powerful, not just as a desktop application, but also because it set a good standard for mobile Twitter apps as well. Few who’ve been around Android for years will deny that TweetDeck for Android was — for a time — the gold standard in Android Twitter apps, and everything else wasn’t as good.
Of course, Twitter acquired TweetDeck awhile ago now, and decided to abandon its Android incarnation to the history books. Not content with this, Paul O’Brien of Modaco fame created Tweakdeck, in an attempt to keep the once-legendary client alive, and to an extent he succeeded, implementing some cool features that the last official version of TweetDeck for Android didn’t have.
And so it has continued, sort of in limbo, that is, until now. I personally use TweetDeck daily on my desktop and laptop, because no other computer-based Twitter client is any good, certainly not the web interface that Twitter wants us to use, which is a steaming pile of poop. Twitter users want a powerful, responsive interface with which to access their social feeds, not a monolithic, single column view as espoused by Twitter.
Well, with the impending update to Twitter’s version 1.1 API, it seems the final nail might finally be driven through TweetDeck. At least, the AIR version (i.e. the desktop client), Android and iPhone versions will soon cease to work, as Twitter depreciates the v1.0 API that these clients rely on to function. Twitter will maintain the Chrome version of TweetDeck, which anyone whose used it can tell you is a heap of junk compared to the AIR client.
For those of us who loved TweetDeck for Android (I know one Daniel Tyson still uses it), it looks as if it has finally reached its expiry. Twitter has said:
To continue to offer a great product that addresses your unique needs, we’re going to focus our development efforts on our modern, web-based versions of TweetDeck. To that end, we are discontinuing support for our older apps: TweetDeck AIR, TweetDeck for Android and TweetDeck for iPhone. They will be removed from their respective app stores in early May and will stop functioning shortly thereafter. We’ll also discontinue support for our Facebook integration.
Twitter is continuing its demonstration that it doesn’t really care about its users, and is trying by any means possible to push users to the web based versions of its clients so it can advertise to them, and try to monetize its product.
