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TweetDeck to discontinue Android and iPhone apps
By Ryan Noik 5 March 2013 | Categories: newsIn some sad news for Android and iPhone TweetDeck users, Twitter has announced that its TweetDeck apps for Android and iPhone will be removed from their respective stores in early May, and cease functioning soon after.
Additionally, there will no longer be support offered for TweetDeck Air, nor for TweetDeck’s Facebook integration.
In a blog post, the company asserted that the decision to discontinue its app support is due to a steady trend by TweetDeck power users who seem to favour accessing TweetDeck on their computers and Twitter on their mobile devices.
Twitter elaborated that this coincides with an increased investment in Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android, such as adding photo filters and other editing capabilities, revamping user profiles and enhancing search.
Power plays
However, not every user of TweetDeck is a power user. Some users quite simply opt for TweetDeck because they don’t like or aren’t satisfied with the standard Twitter client. Others, like us, prefer to access multiple accounts on our Android tablet. Alas, in two months times, it appears that won’t be an option anymore.
Indeed, the company has openly stated awareness of the fact that its reasoning may apply to most of its users, but it does not to all. “For those of you who are inconvenienced by this shift, our sincere apologies,” the company added.
However, Twitter is clearly on its own mission. The company further asserted that its web and Chrome apps “provide the best TweetDeck experience yet”, and revealed that they are the apps in which users will see the company add new capabilities first, followed closely by the Mac and PC apps.
To the point
Admittedly, TweetDeck is certainly not the only Twitter option on the app stores. However, to our minds, this is a symptom of a bigger issue – and a disturbing trend – that we are seeing in the tech industry at large, of company’s deciding for their users what they “should” want, or knowing that a particular decision will be unpopular with its customers and doing so anyway.
Apparently, the customer has become less of a priority than ever, and that is certainly cause for concern.
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