Elon Musk’s acquisition and subsequent gutting of engineering teams has 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 lack of updates between Musk’s acquisition in October and 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 a number of Twitter features offered by the web and mobile versions. This includes things like support for Twitter Spaces, the ability to sign up for Twitter subscriptions from creators, any sort of Twitter Blue support or support for Twitter Blue 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 options, such as Mastodon. There are a number of 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 via 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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