Twitter for Mac is Being Replaced With X iPad App

X, the company formerly known as Twitter is discontinuing its Twitter for Mac and replacing it with the iPad version of the X app. While Twitter for Mac still works as of this writing, the app has been pulled from the Mac App Store, and it may eventually stop working.

When I opened Twitter for Mac this morning, I was greeted with a notification telling me that it was “time to update the app.” The notification redirected me to a new X app on the Mac App Store, and the store listing for this app indicates that it’s “designed for iPad.”

Compared to the existing Twitter for Mac app, using the new X iPad app is quite a regression. I like keeping Twitter for Mac as a thin sidebar docked to the left side of my web browser, but the X app has a greater minimum width and the image previews are too big. As a result, the X app shows less content than Twitter for Mac, as you can see in the image below. With its tiny buttons, the bottom navigation bar on the X app is also less practical than the left navigation bar on Twitter for Mac.

Twitter for Mac had not been updated for years, so the writing was probably on the wall for the app. It’s a shame because after Twitter killed third-party clients last year, the official Twitter for Mac app was the best free desktop Twitter/X client on the market. It doesn’t help that TweetDeck, which has now been rebranded to “X Pro”, now requires an X Premium subscription.

The new X app for Mac is another example of a developer using Project Catalyst, Apple’s new solution to bring iPad apps to the Mac with very few changes. While developers can optimize the interface of these iPad apps for the Mac, the result may not quite look like a native “Mac” app. Apple is pretty much using the same strategy to improve the app situation on its Vision Pro headset, which is compatible with “more than 1.5 million” iOS and iPadOS apps but only has more than 2,000 apps specifically designed for it.