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Twitter officially axes TweetDeck for Android, iOS with new API

Announced a few months ago, the new app programming interface cuts off support for TweetDeck, as well as a handful of third-party Twitter clients.

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Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. He's been hooked on tech since learning BASIC in the late '70s. When not cleaning up after his daughter and son, Steven can be found pedaling around the San Francisco Bay Area. Before joining CNET in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers.
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Steven Musil
2 min read

Twitter has officially pulled the plug on TweetDeck for Android and iPhone, as well as the Adobe AIR desktop version, with the retirement of its API v1.

The microblogging site, which announced API v1's fate this spring but delayed the move by a month, confirmed the disconnect Tuesday in a company blog post.

"Today, we are retiring API v1 and fully transitioning to API v1.1. Given the array of blackout tests, blog posts, Tweets and other updates, this should (hopefully) not be a surprise," Twitter's Taylor Singletary wrote in the post.

The transition means that users of third-party Twitter clients such as TweetDeck, SilverBird, and DestroyTwitter will have to find an alternative app for viewing multiple social networking accounts simultaneously. However, PC and Mac users of TweetDeck will still be able to use the app through its Web and Chrome versions.

While noting that the majority of third-party apps have already transitioned to API v1.1, Singletary wrote that it isn't too late for developers to update their apps and offered a collection of resources he said would smooth the transition.

The updated API also includes restrictions on how often third-party apps can access information on Twitter, as well as limiting the number of users for developers of third-party apps to 100,000 users unless it has permission from Twitter for more.

Twitter acquired TweetDeck in 2011, but instead of improving on the TweetDeck apps in the past two years, TweetDeck said it has been focused on building applications for Web browsers and a Chrome app.