What Remains of the Clients We Loved
Thursday, February 13, 2025
I’ve downloaded thousands of apps as an iOS aficionado since day one. But none have typically inspired me as much as the third-party social media clients that helped build the industry as we know it today. I’m talking about Tweetbot, Twitterrific, Echofon, Twittelator, Tweetie, Alien Blue, Apollo, Narwhal, Comet, among many others. These apps all found ways to offer unique experiences to users that improved upon the original product. In some of these cases, apps were acquired by the platform and twisted and reshaped into first-party clients like Tweetie and Alien Blue which became the X and Reddit apps we have today. Now they are largely unrecognizable as their original third-party predecessors. That’s unfortunate. It’s even more unfortunate that X and Reddit have changed the way they offer their APIs leading to no clients in the case of X and substantially fewer ones in the case of Reddit.
Thankfully, there’s Mastodon and Bluesky and a handful of Reddit developers willing to put up with the current API situation. I find myself frequently reminiscing about the clients of old and am always on the hunt for the best iOS apps so I wanted to talk about what remains of these iconic products.
Ivory is the spiritual successor to what’s largely considered the best Twitter client of all-time, Tweetbot. Outside of the actual content of the timeline, the app largely feels much like Tweetbot did with a handful of tweaks. It’s the most well-designed, thoughtful, and reliable social media client there is today. Much like Tweetbot was. As I’ve said before, I’m holding out hope that the Tapbots team eventually develops a counterpart for Bluesky. We’ll see what happens there, the developers have actually joined the platform in recent weeks leading a few to speculate that it’s in the cards now.
Twitterrific was another incredible Twitter client, in fact you could argue it was the first. While The Iconfactory doesn’t offer a Mastodon or Bluesky client, they do make Tapestry. Tapestry takes a different approach to social media by letting you build custom feeds with Mastodon, Bluesky, Reddit, RSS, YouTube, and others. Though the app only allows you to consume content, there’s no posting available at the moment. Tapestry feels like it has a lot of Twitterrific dna inside it, whether it’s the interesting font choices, the color scheme, the minimalistic timeline design, and even the shape of images and icons.
While we all miss Apollo deeply, it didn’t technically need to die. Though I understand why Christian Selig decided not to move forward with it after his contentious back and forth with Reddit. Despite Apollo’s demise, Narwhal was in fact redesigned and adopted a subscription model to accommodate the changes to API costs. I’ve been using Narwhal 2, the latest version, a lot lately and find it to be cleaner, more customizable, and in some cases more reliable than the first-party Reddit app. Reddit’s official app that’s built on the back of Alien Blue has a lot going on. It’s not bad, but it’s not the best experience. I’d argue Narwhal might just have it beat.
There are other clients for Bluesky, Mastodon, and Reddit. But none of them are as nice or reliable as the three apps mentioned above. They’re the real successors to the iconic clients we all miss dearly. So if you’re feeling nostalgic for Tweetbot, try Ivory. If you’re feeling nostalgic for Twitterrific, try Tapestry. And if you’re feeling nostalgic for Apollo, try Narwhal 2.