Twitter for Mac is officially getting a much-needed overhaul, but not just yet

Twitter doesn’t exactly have the best track record in supporting its loyal third-party developers, which is something that could be forgivable if it built half-decent first party applications. The company’s official apps for the iPhone and iPad have dramatically improved as of late, but the official Twitter for Mac client has felt almost abandoned for years.

Today, at the Twitter Flight developer’s conference, the company has confirmed that a much-needed overhaul to the Mac app is on the way…

While the most-current version of the official Twitter for Mac app doesn’t even support embedded Tweet quoting (which was added to the official iPhone client six months ago, and added to Tweetbot for Mac four months ago), the updated version will apparently add that feature as well as many others including inline Vine playback, highlights in the notifications tab, group DMs, photos in DMs and more. If you’re a regular Twitter user, most of these are probably features you’ve already been using on the web — and in the iOS app — for quite a while.

The image you can see above shows the app running in standard mode, but based on a tweet from the co-founder of Vine (which is now owned by Twitter, for those that don’t know), the app will also bring a dark mode.

[tweet https://twitter.com/rus/status/656883292185174017 align=’center’]

Perhaps even more important than the long-awaited app update, however, now-CEO Jack Dorsey took the stage to apologize to developers for the last couple of years. The company’s relationship has been messy and confusing at times, but Dorsey seems set on mending that.

“Somewhere along the line, our relationship with developers got a little bit complicated, a little bit confusing, a little bit unpredictable,” Dorsey said, according to Variety, adding that the company is sorry and needs to have better transparency going forward. “We want to come to you today, and first and foremost apologize for the confusion.”

Twitter says that the app won’t be out for “a few months” at the very least, so if I were you, I’d just keep on using Tweetbot for Mac (even at $10). It was already one of best Twitter clients for Mac when it got a big update earlier this year, but it has seen significant improvements since — and it already packs most of the features that users that Twitter.app die hards are going to be waiting a few more months to use.

(Image via TechCrunch)