I guess the “Twitter bought Tweetie” should have scared the hell out of many 3rd party developers. And I quite understand their position, as it’s not easy to develop a Twitter client knowing that Twitter itself bought the best client on the market and made it official. And free.
That’s why many devs are freaking out. I’ve heard many of them claiming that they will quit development of their apps, others who are simply very sad about the situation. And some who decided to sell their own suite of applications on eBay. Keep on reading to find out what exactly happened.
The application is Tweeterena, and it’s up for sale on eBay here. Actually, the complete Tweeterena suite is ready to be sold to the best offer, with a staring bid of $15.000. From the item page:
“This is an exciting new venture to own Tweeterena. Not just a copy of Tweeterena but own the entire suite of Tweeterena mobile applications including our new iPad app, the Tweeterena website, source code projects, and take complete control over this worldwide established brand.
Up until now Tweeterena has been a bit of a hobby, I have been putting every bit of spare time into the project. Believe it or not, I do have a day job and due to this and various other new commitments in my life I feel it is time to move this ongoing project into the hands of somebody else who will be able to put the time in to developing it further.”
Read: I have been developing the app for a while, but considering that Twitter itself entered the market with the best app around, I don’t think it’s worth developing it anymore. From a dev standpoint, this makes quite sense.
The problem is, I think the whole situation is very sad. We might laugh at these attempts to desperately make the last dime of money from an app, but in the very end is sad that devs have come to this point just because a company decided to enter a crowded market not from the back door, but breaking the front one. Developers feel “betrayed” from the platform, and discouraged to keep on working on their apps any longer.
Fortunately, many devs feel this way, not all developers. Thank God there still some guys who think they can always do better and better, and Iconfactory is the example to follow.
