The Android, iPhone and Adobe AIR versions of the Tweetdeck app from Twitter are living on borrowed time. These versions of the Twitter tool are set to be retired in early May this year says an update from the Tweetdeck blog.
The Android and iPhone apps will be pulled from their respective app stores in May and they will stop functioning soon afterwards. Before the May cutoff users may experience some outages so it won’t even be smooth sailing until then.
The applications are being canned, in part, because they all make use of Twitter’s v1.0 API which will also be biting the dust at about the same time. The other part is that “we’ve seen a steady trend towards people using TweetDeck on their computers and Twitter on their mobile devices” and the company will now be focusing on the Chrome and web applications, preferring to focus resources on Twitter for mobile devices.
“This trend coincides with an increased investment in Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android –– adding photo filters and other editing capabilities, revamping user profiles and enhancing search. 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.”
For the moment it seems that the PC and Mac versions of the Tweetdeck app are safe but the Tweetdeck team believes that “these web and Chrome apps provide the best TweetDeck experience yet, and that they are the apps in which you’ll want to see us add new capabilities first.”
Source: CNET