If you have been reluctant in adopting the new TweetDeck and still used the old versions before Twitter bought them – then time is up, I’m afraid. Twitter has announced that they will kill the old Tweetdeck AIR desktop app, and the TweetDeck mobile apps on Android and iPhone.
“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,” TweetDeck said in a blog post.
Twitter said that they were also shutting down the apps because of increased focus on the official mobile apps on iOS and Android; and that because the old apps are using v1.0 of Twitter’s API – which is being retired starting this month. Users on these apps can expect rolling blackouts in order to push old users off apps using the old API.
I should stress that this does not mean the current TweetDeck Desktop App is going away. However, if you’re still on the old AIR-powered desktop app (you can tell, it has a yellow icon instead of the blue); then you’ll either have to use the current desktop app or find another desktop client. And, of course, there are the web and Chrome apps.
And for mobile users? There are a whole bunch of better alternatives – we’ve covered some Android ones here.
Just make sure you don’t all flood towards the clients, however. As Long Zheng, developer of MetroTwit, has pointed out:
Dear TweetDeck refugees, please don’t all rush to MetroTwit. You’ll kill our token cap too.
— Long Zheng (@longzheng) March 4, 2013
As well, something that has received little coverage is that Tweetdeck is dumping Facebook support altogether. Basically, you will not be able to manage both your Facebook and Twitter accounts in one client. A sign of a feud between the two companies? Perhaps, but it’s probably Twitter wanting its app to be just focused around its ecosystem.