Sunsetting MetroTwit: all good things must come to an end

Cross-posting this from the MetroTwit blog since this project was a big part of my life since 2010. I’m proud to have built an app that so many people enjoyed using day-in day-out. It was an amazing learning experience about WPF, .NET desktop apps and shipping a consumer application (before the Windows Store).

I want to personally thank everyone in the developer communities and Microsoft developer evangelists who helped us get across many challenging technical hurdles and made it possible for us to deliver a great Twitter experience on Windows for as long as we could.

We are saddened to announce the end-of-life of the MetroTwit for Desktop and MetroTwit for Windows 8 apps effective immediately.

Due to the “access token limit” imposed by Twitter since August 2012, we are preemptively sunsetting MetroTwit due to technical limitations of Twitter’s API which may prevent existing users from accessing the app after the limit has been crossed.

Effective immediately, we will be removing the MetroTwit for Desktop installer and MetroTwit for Windows 8 Store listing to ensure the app remains usable by all current users.

If you’re a current MetroTwit user, we apologise for the inconvenience but don’t worry, the apps you love to use will continue to work. However, we will not be supporting the app or releasing any major new features and updates.

We’re extremely proud to have worked on MetroTwit and want to thank the over 400,000 Twitter users who used MetroTwit over the past 4 years and have helped shape and support it.

A very special thanks to our MetroTwit Loop beta group who have been our exceedingly enthusiastic supporters and have let us know both the good and bad about MetroTwit since our first beta version.

None of us could have ever imagined what a humble Photoshop mockup would become as popular and acclaimed as MetroTwit. Not without its challenges and struggles, we’re proud to have worked on this app and its many updates.

Once again, thank you all.

The MetroTwit team
David Golden, Winston Pang, Long Zheng

18 insightful thoughts

    1. Also sad, I know this is old but wonder if the form MetroTwit team will realease the source code into github, or codeplex… would really like to see some of the xaml magic

  1. The desktop client was really wonderful and it was amazing to see the client progress over the years. Thank-you Long, David, and Winston for all your work on Metrotwit, I’m looking forward to your next projects!

  2. MetroTwit was, and still is, the best Twitter client for Windows. It’s also one of the cleanest, sharpest and most thoughtful pieces of software on the entire Windows desktop platform. That’s something you need to be really proud of, guys.

  3. Can you give us a few days access to the installer so that we can squirrel it away so that if we need to re-install windows or anything like that, we’ll still be able to re-install it?

  4. I’m incredibly sad to see this go. However, you must realize, that as the internet works, you’ll never be able to stop copies of MetroTwit from being distributed over the internet, and gradually it’ll hit the ceiling?

    While I know it sounds incredibly greedy, couldn’t open-sourcing the backend for MetroTwit and allowing people to set up their own variants bypass the token restriction?

  5. Is it possible for you to release the source code? Developers could use it to produce better UIs.

  6. Hi, I’ve been using MetroTwit for years, and am proud to have paid for MetroTwit. Despite MetroTwit effectively now being dead, I still believe I got my money’s worth out of it. So thank you for all the effort you’ve put in over the last few years.

    But, could you please send MetroTwit Plus users a link to the installer? I never bother keeping the installer and although one day Twitter will change the API and MetroTwit will stop working, I plan to use it up to that date.

    Finally, Please consider opening the source. You don’t have to distribute your API keys so it won’t affect existing users, and can let MetroTwit survive whatever twitter throws at it. Yes, it can be hard to watch others try to make money off your hard work, and that may happen, but the correct license should stop that, and personally, I think it’s a better outcome than letting MetroTwit just die.

    I also think opening the code lets other developers learn from your achievements.

    Again thank you for all your hard effort, and best of luck on your future projects!

  7. Its strange going back and seeing the original first post for MetroTwit on your blog where everyone was so excited for the client. Its also funny as well to see my own account preserved as part of the final promo shots on the site!

    I also second the people here asking for some kind of standalone installer (maybe sans default API key) for those of us who want to keep using it till we can’t any more. Maybe e-mail out a download link to everyone that bought MetroTwit Plus?

    Either way, thank you for all the hard work. Hope you guys think of something new and cool to work on next!

  8. A question … Could we not get a feature so we can add our own keys? Then I’ld rgister my own app, and have MetroTwit work as if it’s my software.

    I just hate to see the best Twitter client disappear. Of course, a source code release would be good for me as well.

    1. The last update did add this feature, go in to settings and do a check for updates. The final version is 1.2.0.0.
      The custom API key and secret fields are on the ‘twitter’ tab under settings.

  9. sad, I know and this is old but wonder if the form MetroTwit team will realease the source code into github, or codeplex… would really like to see some of the xaml magic

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