Blog

We are very happy to announce that Tweetbot for Mac is finally available for sale on the Mac App Store! It’s been a long (and bumpy) road, but we are glad we have finally made it to the 1.0 milestone. This is our first official Mac App from Tapbots (unless you want to count Pastebot Sync), and thanks to Todd Thomas for all his hard work, we have something to be proud of. But it doesn’t end here. We are working on version 1.1 and have much more coming to all versions of Tweetbot.

For now, learn more about Tweetbot for Mac and purchase it on the Mac App Store.

Why is Tweetbot for Mac $20?

If you think about it, it’s not that expensive. Twenty dollars for a quality piece of software that you use every day? That has been the price point for quality utility apps on the Mac for years. However, it’s not just the development time and attention we put into the app that commands the higher price.

Because of Twitter’s recent enforcement of token limits, we only have a limited number of tokens available for Tweetbot for Mac. These tokens dictate how many users Tweetbot for Mac can have. The app’s limit is separate from, but much smaller than, the limit for Tweetbot for iOS. Once we use up the tokens granted to us by Twitter, we will no longer be able to sell the app to new users. Tapbots will continue to support Tweetbot for Mac for existing customers at that time.

This limit and our desire to continue to support the app once we sell out is why we’ve priced Tweetbot for Mac a little higher than we’d like. It’s the best thing we can do for the long term viability of the product. We know some will not be happy about Tweetbot for Mac’s pricing, but the bottom line is Twitter needs to provide us with more tokens for us to be able to sell at a lower the price. We spent a year developing this app and it’s the only way for us to be able to make our money back and continue supporting it with updates in the future. Feel free to let Twitter know how you feel about it.

If you’ve used the Alphas/Betas and have decided not to purchase, please do us a huge favor and Revoke access; that frees up extra tokens for potential customers (the betas will expire anyways). We truly appreciate your support whether you make the purchase or not. You guys have been a great help during the beta process.

Today we’re releasing our newest bots into the world; Netbot for iPhone and Netbot for iPad. These are our clients for the App.net social network. If you love Tweetbot and are on App.net, you’ll want Netbot.

Continue Reading

As some of you may have already noticed the download link for the Tweetbot for Mac alpha no longer works. Twitter’s latest API Changes means now we have a large but finite limit on the number of user tokens we can get for Tweetbot for Mac. We’ve been working with Twitter over the last few days to try to work around this limit for the duration of the beta but have been unable to come up with a solution that was acceptable to them. Because of this we’ve decided its best for us to pull the alpha.

Continue Reading

There’s been a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt generated by Twitter’s latest announcement. I wanted to let everyone know that the world isn’t ending, Tweetbot for Mac is coming out soon, Tweetbot for iOS isn’t going anywhere. So sit down, grab a towel and let’s go over some of these API changes.

Continue Reading

There’s been a lot of rumors going around lately that Apple is rejecting applications that send out device UDIDs but there’s not been any direct confirmation from Apple that this is a new policy. Well this morning we just got that confirmation in the form of a rejection.

Now this isn’t a particularly big deal for us since we already had code in place, for Tweetbot 2.3, that removes the need for UDID. It was a simple matter of moving that code back into 2.2 and re-submitting to Apple. We had a fixed version updated and uploaded to Apple within 2 hours of getting this message and are once again waiting for approval. If you are an app developer and depend on UDID for any functionality it’s time to migrate away from it, sooner or later Apple will catch you.

Why did we use UDIDs? We used them only for our push notification services in order to be able to match up a given device to its push notification settings. This allowed us to restore push notifications settings after Tweetbot was deleted and re-installed. With this new change in place this is no longer possible, if you delete and re-install Tweetbot you’ll have to setup your push notification settings again. Your device’s UDID never went anywhere besides our push notification services and has never been shared with anyone.