TweetDeck kills its iPhone, Android, AIR apps in favour of browser client

If you’ve been using TweetDeck apps on your phone or desktop, we have bad news for you. Twitter has announced that it will be axing TweetDeck’s apps for iPhone, Android and Adobe AIR Desktop. The apps will disappear from their respective stores early May onwards and will stop functioning soon after. The company will be discontinuing Facebook integration too.

TweetDeck stated that the apps are being killed in favour of its browser version. The company said that over the past 18 months, it had been focused on building a fast and feature-rich web application for modern browsers as well as a Chrome app that offers some unique features like notifications. The team at TweetDeck has been working on providing users of the browser app with weekly updates that add more features over time, like updated Tweet streams, search auto-complete, search filters and more.

Say goodbye to your TweetDeck apps

TweetDeck’s team seems to have a valid explanation for pulling the plug on its apps. “Over the past few years, we’ve seen a steady trend towards people using TweetDeck on their computers and Twitter on their mobile devices.” This trend, the blog reads, coincides with an increased investment in the Twitter apps for iPhone and Android––photo filters and other editing capabilities were added, the user profiles were revamped and search got a couple of new features. “That said, we know this applies to most of our users––not all of them. And for those of you who are inconvenienced by this shift, our sincere apologies.”

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TweetDeck announced that the apps it is discontinuing relied on c1.0 of Twitter’s API, which is about to be retired starting this month. TweetDeck for browsers will be receiving the API v1.1 update though.

While we know Twitter has clamped down on third-party apps to help shift users’ focus to its own products, this development comes as a surprise, as it owns TweetDeck. The app has always been a popular third-party client and Twitter had been doing a good job of maintaining it as its very own, yet separate app. We find it highly doubtful, but Twitter will hopefully be able to develop TweetDeck for browsers to be the next best thing.

Twitter acquired TweetDeck, its biggest third-party competitor at the time, in May 2011. The deal was closed at $40 million, including cash and stock. The app had so far been receiving updates regularly. Back in October last year, an update to the web and desktop clients brought customisation options that allowed you to change the colour theme and the font size.