Over the years, there have been countless examples of Twitter prioritizing their own app and a closed ecosystem approach over third-party developers and improvements to the API. For a while, it looked like Tweetie would live on, but then Twitter started adding questionable features to it, and it became clear that the third-party Twitter client would be persona non grata on the App Store. In April 2010, Twitter realized that they needed an official iOS presence on the App Store, so they bought Loren Brichter’s Tweetie, relaunched it as Twitter for iPhone, and Brichter released the ( unsurprisingly genius) Twitter for iPad. If you’re using an iOS app today, there’s a good chance some of its features or design ideas first appeared in a Twitter client five years ago. The constraints of Twitter clients in 2009/2010 freed many from the struggle of coming up with an original app idea. As a Twitter developer, you needed to design an app that would primarily display textual information (this was before Twitter photos), handle hyperlinks, manage interactions between users, account for different network conditions, possibly integrate with third-party sharing services years before iOS 8, and, most of all, be fast, responsive, and easy to use. Good Twitter clients weren’t easy to create, but the challenge they packed was intriguing and flexible. And then there were Weet, Osfoora, Birdfeed, Twittelator, Echofon, Tweetings, TweetList, and dozens of other apps that helped refine and redefine the idea of what Twitter on an iPhone could be. Twitterrific, the first native Twitter client for iPhone, effectively invented key aspects of modern Twitter interaction and terminology Tweetie, perhaps the most popular Twitter client of its time, pioneered touch interaction paradigms such as pull to refresh. That was a time of astonishing innovation in mobile app design. The core Twitter experience would always be the same the design and preferences around it would differ from client to client. As a user, there was little friction in trying multiple Twitter clients: because Twitter data was always “in the cloud”, changing clients was like choosing a different outfit each day. Twitter made sense as a social network in your pocket Apple’s iPhone OS and newly launched App Store made that a reality.
IPhone apps and the Twitter API were a perfect match five years ago. In the golden days of third-party Twitter apps, a good new client would come out at least every month, with several developers pitching their own ideas for what was meant to be a mobile-first communication network.
#Tweetbot ios8 software#
The growing popularity of Twitter, an open API, and the rapid takeoff of the App Store contributed to the creation of a defining genre of mobile software in 20: the Twitter client for iPhone.
Twitter clients used to be a UI design playground.
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