Tweetdeck, the Twitter client acquired by Twitter in 2011, will soon exist as a mostly web-based only service. The company is shutting down the AIR-based version for the desktop, and will remove the iPhone and Android versions from app stores in May.
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 still seems dedicated to TweetDeck as a tool for power users, as today’s announcement notes that the dev team has doubled in size in the last 6 months. However, the current versions of TweetDeck for AIR, iPhone and Android still use version 1.0 of Twitter’s API, which will be retired over the next few weeks, and the apps Twitter announced for retirement today haven’t been updated in a long time.
