Twitter Acquires Tweetie

Apr 10, 2010 by Matt | Posted in Featured, Software & Scripts 3 Comments

The big news story of the day, it seems, is that Twitter is acquiring Tweetie. You know, the popular (arguably the most popular) Twitter iPhone application? Yes, that Tweetie. The $2.99 app is going to be free from now on, and it will be renamed “Twitter for iPhone.” This stems from newbie users’ frustration and confusion when they search for an official “Twitter” app, only to find a mess of clients with unfamiliar names.

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve entered into an agreement with Atebits (aka Loren Brichter) to acquire Tweetie, a leading iPhone Twitter client. Tweetie will be renamed Twitter for iPhone and made free (currently $2.99) in the iTunes AppStore in the coming weeks. Loren will become a key member of our mobile team that is already having huge impact with device makers and service providers around the world. Loren’s work won the 2009 Apple Design Award and we will eventually launch Twitter for iPad with his help.

So we can look forward to an iPad version of Tweetie, and possibly more frequent updates since Loren Brichter is joining Twitter’s mobile team.

One burning question has plagued exiting Tweetie users in the hours after the announcement: what will become of Tweetie for Mac? Good news, a beta of version 2 is sill on the way, according to an Atebits posting on the MacHeist forum. (Loren had previously promised buyers of the recent MacHeist bundle early beta access.)

Hey all – first of all I apologize for any confusion, things have been a bit crazy!  I just want to says I’m blasting through the todo list to get a beta put together as fast as I can, the Mac UI stuff I’ve been prototyping is just too cool to have anything else happen to it.  Sorry for keeping it short, gotta get back to coding!

  • http://www.problogdesign.com/ Michael Martin

    I’m not entirely sure this was necessary to be honest. One of the nicest things about Twitter is that there is so much competition between 3rd party tools. Would be a shame to see that people stop trying out new tools just because Twitter have an official app now :(

    That said, pretty nice of them to make it free! Can’t really complain there :D

    • http://www.webmaster-source.com Matt

      I don’t know if it will keep people from trying different clients. The users apt to doing that kind of thing are, for the most part, geeks who will continue to do so. The “official” app idea is mainly targeted at the kind of people who don’t care beyond searching for what they expect to be the official application.

      I’m afraid it might hurt Twitter client development on the iPhone because, surely, there are at least a few developers with the same mindset as Tr.im: “we can’t possibly compete with x, because Twitter made them the official one!” If someone will complain about Twitter making Bit.ly their default shortener, there will be plenty who don’t like Twitter having an official iPhone application.

  • Karlitoo Bing

    For months and months, the company has kept its web site relatively spare and instead encouraged third parties to build out novel features and presences for it on other devices. See more