Tweetbot and Ivory Developer is Working on “Phoenix” App for Bluesky

Tapbots, the developer of popular Tweetbot and Ivory third-party clients for Twitter and Mastodon is working on Phoenix, a new Bluesky client for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS (via MacStories). The small company plans to release Phoenix in the summer and keep working on its Mastodon client Ivory, which became the company’s priority after Twitter’s API changes two years ago led to the death of Tweetbot and other third-party Twitter clients.

As a heavy Twitter user myself, I really liked Tweetbot as it offered timeline synchronization across Apple devices. This is something Ivory, Tapbots’ Mastodon client also supports, and I hope Phoenix will also offer this feature. While the official Bluesky mobile app covers the basics pretty well, it doesn’t offer granular notification controls and timeline sync, which remains the most useful feature for me.

If Twitter/X remains the leading microblogging platform today, it’s being challenged by the “fediverse,” a network of decentralized social platforms that includes Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky. Mastodon is probably harder to use as it’s a constellation of different servers that can talk to each other, which can be confusing for people used to traditional social networks. That’s probably why Mastodon doesn’t get as much momentum as Threads and Bluesky, which are much more similar to Twitter/X.

“Mastodon is our home on the social web and we will continue to invest our time there, the Tapbots team said in an FAQ about Phoenix. “Since the incredible growth of Bluesky in the past year, our customer base has become split between the two services and for us to continue to thrive as a company, we must support both. Unfortunately, we can’t survive on Mastodon alone.”

Mastodon, Threads, and other platforms like WordPress use the decentralized ActivityPub protocol, which Tapbots sees as “the future of the social web.” Bluesky, however, created its own AT Protocol for building decentralized social apps. There are already social media aggregators like Openvibe and Tapestry that let users see Mastodon and Bluesky posts into one combined feed, but Tapbots chose to invest in two separate apps.

“While there may be some conveniences of an app that supports multiple social media protocols, we believe the experience will be much better overall if we keep them separate. We do plan to provide a way to cross-post between them so you don’t have to write duplicate posts,” the company explained.