Twitter for Mac abandoned: Missing features, no ‘X’ rebranding, bugs galore

Update August 29, 2023: Twitter for Mac still hasn’t been updated since Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company. This means Twitter for Mac is still named “Twitter for Mac,” and does not reference the new “X” name of the social network anywhere. It also still lacks the vast majority of X Premium features.

Original story published May 17, 2023: Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company and subsequent gutting of engineering teams have left Twitter for Mac in the lurch. The app hasn’t received a single update since Musk’s acquisition and is lacking many features key to the “new Twitter” experience (which may not be a bad thing for some users).

Twitter offered a dedicated app for Mac for several years but dropped support for it in 2018 and instead pointed users toward the web version of the service. A year later, however, Twitter for Mac returned with a new version of the app based on Apple’s Catalyst platform and the app’s iPad codebase.

Admittedly, the pre-Musk version of Twitter wasn’t always great about keeping Twitter for Mac updated. Still, according to App Store version history, the app received pretty regular updates. The current lack of updates – from Musk’s acquisition in October to now – is the longest gap in at least the past 18 months, according to the App Store.

The last update to Twitter for Mac was on October 7, 2022. Musk’s completed his acquisition of Twitter on October 27, 2022, and layoffs began almost immediately.

As it stands today, Twitter for Mac lacks several Twitter features offered by the web and mobile versions. This includes support for Twitter Spaces, the ability to sign up for Twitter subscriptions from creators, any support for Twitter Blue and its exclusive features, and more.

Even beyond missing features, Twitter for Mac is growing increasingly buggy and unreliable. Users have complained of an increased number of crashes, failed timeline updates, and posting failures. Even for users who are happy that Twitter for Mac is rid of some of Musk’s questionable feature changes and additions, the overall reliability of the app is a problem.

9to5Mac’s Take

Whether or not Twitter has any plans to update Twitter for Mac again remains to be seen. Musk has laid off the vast majority of Twitter’s staff, and the Mac app is likely a victim of engineering staff shortages. Even Musk has admitted that he may need to rehire some of the employees he initially fired.

Twitter for Mac is obviously far more niche than Twitter for iPhone, Android, and the web. Many of the people who use Twitter for Mac, however, likely fall into the “power user” category and post quite a bit on the platform. Twitter for Mac’s abandonment could push those users to explore other platforms, such as Mastodon. There are several excellent Mastodon clients for Mac currently available (and more to come).

And, of course, Twitter also killed off support for third-party Twitter clients – many of which were available on the Mac. This leaves Twitter for Mac as the sole option for Mac users, short of using the web version or something like Tweeten.

There are ways for Twitter to offer an app on the Mac without too much overhead, including simply letting Apple Silicon users install the iPad version of their app on their Mac.

I reached out to Twitter for a comment on the future of Twitter for Mac and was greeted with the company’s auto-response for press emails.

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