Following Twitter’s announcement that they would be discontinuing TweetDeck for iPhone, Android, and Adobe Air, the company has now officially announced the expiration date for those versions of the app as May 7. On that date, Twitter will permanently disable the apps from functioning, and dropping all support and development.
The news came as a short update to the previous post on Twitter’s blog. It’s worth noting, however, that TweetDeck for Mac and the TweetDeck web interface will will remain available for the foreseeable future. The move represents Twitter’s decision to focus mainly on the web version of TweetDeck, which will presumably be updated and improved at a quicker rate as a result.
Even so, the news comes as a disappointment to those who use and appreciate the TweetDeck mobile app. Twitter has demonstrated time and time again that they would rather encourage users to use their web interface (they made this particularly clear with their recent API change, which specifically discourages developers from offering third-party Twitter clients). This is just the latest push in their effort to enforce that idea.
While it’s understandable that Twitter may not want to keep putting resources into the TweetDeck mobile app, going as far as disabling all existing versions from functioning seems a bit drastic…
