Twitter has announced plans to shut down TweetDeck apps for the iPhone and Android handsets in addition to shuttering the Adobe AIR desktop version according to a recent post on the company's blog. Furthermore, Twitter says they will discontinue support for their Facebook integration.
We are told that the apps will be removed from their respective app stores in early May and will cease to function shortly thereafter. Users may notice intermittent outages between now and then, however, as v1.0 of Twitter's API (which these services rely on) is being retired later this month.
Twitter says they have been focused on building a fast and feature-rich web application for modern browsers since acquiring TweetDeck in 2011 and the idea of doubling down on the TweetDeck web experience is a reflection of where power users are going.
The team says they have noticed a trend over the past few years of people using TweetDeck on their computers and Twitter on their mobile device. As such, they have invested heavily in Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android by adding features like photo filters and editing capabilities, revamping user profiles and enhancing search.
The company's weekly web releases have only been possible due to the fact that they've nearly doubled the size of the TweetDeck team over the past six months and are still hiring.
As for closing the aforementioned services, the team offered their sincere apologies to those that are inconvenienced by the shift.