Twitter Drops TweetDeck Apps for iPhone, Android, and Air

Twitter is losing more friends lately, with this week's announcement of plans to discontinue iPhone, Android, and Air versions of the highly popular TweetDeck client, purchased by the company back in 2011.

The development team responsible for the application announced via their blog, "We're going to focus our development efforts on our modern, Web-based versions of TweetDeck."  The development team also announced that it would discontinue support for Facebook integration with the Twitter client.

Instead, the development team's full focus is transitioning to building which they call a "feature-rich Web application for modern browsers, and a Chrome app, which offers some unique features like notifications."

Performance Might Be Sporadic

The existing TweetDeck apps are based on version 1.0 of Twitter's API. Twitter has since produced 1.1 of the API. Twitter has cautioned that performance of the existing mobile apps might be sporadic until the company stops offering them entirely.

Twitter doesn't plan to ditch its TweetDeck clients for PCs and Macs, although those haven't been updated yet to version 1.1, either.

Meanwhile, via a blog post just over six months ago, Twitter announced strict new rules for third-party developers mimicking the "mainstream Twitter consumer/client experience." Within the post, Twitter said that third-party developers would have only six months to bring their applications into compliance with version 1.1 of the API.

While some developers have worked alongside Twitter to help meet these new rules, others like Tumblr have spoken out against the restrictions.

Sources: NBC, Twitter, The Verge