Official Twitter iPad app coming – will it end up being the only one?

But what about the iPad? We’re only about a week into the iPad’s existence, and while popular Twitter apps like Twittelator, Twitterrific and TweetDeck have released iPad-specific versions of their apps already, how much of that development will continue now that Twitter has announced that an iPad-specific official Twitter app is also on its way? If I’m a developer, I’m going to view the prospects of continuing work on my popular, seasoned, version 3.0 iPhone app a lot differently than the challenge of continuing to crank out the development dirty work on my version 1.0 iPad app that’s still raw, still needs plenty of attention, has only been live for a week, and as of yet has only a relative handful of users.

Not that I expect the biggest Twitter app developers to just walk away from their shiny new iPad apps without some kind of fight. But the typical iPad user, who’s far from married to any one particular iPad Twitter app after one week of use, is I suspect far more likely to gravitate toward Twitter’s official app than a long-time iPhone user who’s got years invested in using their favorite Twitter iPhone app. Of course that depends on just how long it takes Twitter to get its official iPad app out the door. And if it ends up taking longer for Twitter to release the app than Tweetie’s developer would have been able to pull off on his own, then this acquisition ends up actually being a boon to them in the short term.

But I still suspect that the impending release “Twitter for iPad” will have a dampening effect on any developers who’d been thinking about releasing an iPad Twitter app of their own. Not that that’s a bad thing by any means. In fact, back in the late nineties, when the Mac platform was littered with various decent music library managers but nothing killer, Apple bought one of the most promising ones and brought its developer in to finish the job (today you know the product as “iTunes). And while the competing third party music manager programs did largely go by the wayside, The Mac platform is significantly better off for it; the original “SoundJam MP” could never have reached the level of quality and refinement that iTunes has over the years if it had continued to be developed by one guy with one guy’s resources.

That having been said, as I scan the App Store today and see apps I’ve never heard of like “TweetTime for iPad” and “Twitepad” I can’t help but wonder how much longer we’ll be seeing those kinds of upstart iPad Twitter apps popping up. And in the long term, I wonder just how few (if any) third party Twitter iPad apps will survive in any meaningful way.

About Bill Palmer

Bill Palmer is Editor in Chief of Beatweek Magazine. His editorial contributions include interviews with musicians and iPhone industry coverage.