Let’s just say that January 12th was expected, yet still surprising. We knew the cutting and slashing at Twitter would affect us at some point, but how we’d get eviscerated was an unknown.
Many other people saw it was coming as reality began to sink in at the end of October. We’ve been asked, countless times: “Are you folks working on a Mastodon app?”
The answer isn’t a simple one.
(But honestly, we loved seeing all the creative names that people have come up with when asking the question!).
First Things First
Our current priority is completing chapter 3 of Frenzic: Overtime on Apple Arcade. The game has been immensely fun to work on and we’re grateful Apple gave us a long-awaited opportunity to revisit our first game for the iPhone. We’ll be working on Frenzic until late spring of this year. We’re a small team and don’t have the resources to work on more than one major internal project at a time. Any new social media app will unfortunately have to wait.
Beyond Twitter
Even though we’re not currently working on an app, we’re all definitely thinking about the Fediverse and are active on Mastodon. We feel like this is a good time to step back, slow down, and think about where we want to head post-Twitter.
As we speak, teams of talented developers are building a plethora of great apps for Mastodon. It’s going to be a crowded, more mature market, and we don’t like being latecomers. We have a long history of firsts on Twitter: the first app ever in 2007, the first iPhone app in 2008, and the first iPad app in 2010.
However, the Fediverse is bigger than Mastodon: A new thing called ActivityPub is being used to power not just Mastodon but a lot of other interesting services.
This open standard is exciting, and it’s just one of the things we’ll be exploring and experimenting with as we decide which direction to take later this year.
Stay Tuned
So yeah, a simple question without a simple answer.
But one thing is for sure: When the time comes, we won’t be able to do it without your help. We’re grateful for all the love you’ve shown us and Twitterrific in the past, and we know we can count on you for support and feedback for whatever comes next!
To keep apprised of what our future looks like, make sure to follow our new @Iconfactory account (on our shiny new Mastodon instance!)
