Tweetbot

» see tapbots.com/tweetbot as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

tweetbot was the twitter client a certain kind of power user wouldn't shut up about. tapbots, a two-person studio led by paul haddad and mark jardine, shipped it for iphone on 14 april 2011. it cost ten dollars in a category where every other app was free. people paid for it the way they paid for tweetbot 2 and 3 and 6: not because it did anything basic clients couldn't, but because every interaction in it had been thought about for too long.

the design was unusual. tweetbot looked like a control panel from a small piece of industrial hardware: switches that clicked when you tapped them and timeline gestures that felt mechanical. each account had its own stats screen with follower deltas nobody had asked for. it was a power user's twitter and not a casual user's twitter, and the people who lived in it talked about it the way some people talk about emacs.

the first time i heard about tweetbot was reading other people's screenshots from a desktop browser. i never had it on a phone. i was on android during most of tweetbot's lifetime, then on the official twitter app whenever i tried twitter on ios at all. the app sat in the part of ios subculture i could see but had no reason to enter.

~ the record ~

~ what made it different ~

tweetbot was an opinionated client. it kept a strict reverse-chronological timeline at the moment when official twitter was moving toward an algorithm. it muted users and hashtags and entire keyword sets at a granular level the official app refused to offer. it synced its read position across devices through icloud, which sounded boring until you realized it was the only twitter client that did it well.

the appeal was simple: people who used twitter heavily preferred the app that treated heavy use as the default case. you could open tweetbot at 11pm and pick up reading where you'd left off at 8am on a different device, with zero retraversal. the official twitter app deliberately did not do this because it wanted you to scroll the algorithmic feed, not catch up on a chronological one.

~ the postmortem ~

12 january 2023. the same morning that twitterrific stopped working, tweetbot stopped working. for several days the tapbots account did not know what was going on. on 17 january twitter retroactively updated its developer agreement to ban "third-party clients of the twitter applications." on 19 january tapbots announced tweetbot was discontinued.

tapbots had built tweetbot for almost twelve years. the entire studio's revenue depended on a single api endpoint that twitter could revoke at any moment, and twitter eventually did. it was the kind of platform-risk story every developer is supposed to know about. it had still gone on for so long that "twitter cannot kill us" had stopped being a serious concern.

~ the inheritance ~

tapbots launched ivory, a mastodon client, the same week tweetbot died. it ran on the same design grammar. it works fine. mastodon does not have the cultural mass twitter had in 2012, so ivory will never have tweetbot's audience. but it ships, which is more than most platform-dependent apps get to do after their platform turns on them.

the deeper inheritance is the cluster of small ios apps that took design cues from tweetbot. tapbots' switches and gestures showed up in dozens of indie utilities through the 2010s. the studio is mostly remembered for tweetbot, but its real footprint is the visual language other apps borrowed and never gave back.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »