Twitter kills Tweetdeck apps for iPhone and Android in favor of web apps

Twitter announced Monday afternoon that it would be shutting down older Tweetdeck apps for iPhone and Android, as well as Tweetdeck AIR and discontinuing Facebook support, in an effort to get people using Tweetdeck apps for web.

The shift for Tweetdeck users comes as Twitter continues to focus on monetization and has shut down third-party app experiences that haven’t fit with the company’s goals. However, after the company acquired Tweetdeck it continued to improve the Twitter web app experience, having just announced updates in February, which gave some users hope that it wasn’t going to shut down Tweetdeck entirely.

The company explained the update that will shift users to web apps over the older mobile apps in a blog post:

“TweetDeck is the most powerful Twitter tool for tracking real-time conversations. Its flexibility and customizable layout let you keep up with what’s happening on Twitter, across multiple topics and accounts, in real time. To continue to offer a great product that addresses your unique needs, we’re going to focus our development efforts on our modern, web-based versions of TweetDeck. To that end, we are discontinuing support for our older apps: TweetDeck AIR, TweetDeck for Android and TweetDeck for iPhone. They will be removed from their respective app stores in early May and will stop functioning shortly thereafter. We’ll also discontinue support for our Facebook integration.

Over the past 18 months, we’ve been focused on building a fast and feature-richweb application for modern browsers, and a Chrome app, which offers some unique features like notifications. We’ve recently introduced many enhancements to these apps –– a new look and feel, tools like search term autocomplete and search filtersto help you find what you’re looking for more quickly, and automatically-updating Tweet streams so you immediately see the most recent Tweets. Our weekly web releases have been possible because we’ve nearly doubled the size of the TweetDeck team over the past six months (and we’re still hiring).”