Once of the last vestiges of "old Twitter" has quietly disappeared. The Twitter app for macOS has vanished from Apple's App Store. Now, existing users of the legacy app are being forced to "upgrade" to the X iPad app instead.
The change was flagged by an app developer Wednesday night, who dubbed it the "end of an era."
But this forced change isn't exactly an upgrade. Besides the obvious platform and hardware differences between a Mac computer and an iPad, the now-defunct Mac version had also kept Twitter's old branding prior to Elon Musk's $44 billion takeover in 2022. The Twitter Mac app was also ad-free, meaning its users weren't being exposed to some of X/Twitter's bizarre rotation of political ads, fake ads with Community Notes, or ads for crypto scams.
The iPad X app will only work on Macs with Apple Silicon chips, however, so those on older machines without an M-series chip will have to use X via a web browser instead, iMore reports. Paying for X will help reduce the amount of ads shown, but those looking for a free experience will no longer be able to avoid ads.
Some users have reported issues when trying to switch to the X app for iPad on their Macs, however. One Redditor warned Mac users that their X account was immediately suspended after logging into the latest version of the app. X software engineer Zach Warunek said late Wednesday that the company was looking into the issue.
Since its inception, Twitter's Mac app has faced a series of false starts and intermittent shutdowns over the years. Twitter had largely ignored its Mac app under its prior ownership, and reportedly updated the app in 2015 by hiring a third-party digital studio to rebuild it. The Twitter for Mac app was later discontinued in 2018, and then relaunched in late 2019 after being unavailable for about a year.
Back in May, Musk finally completed Twitter's full branding migration to X by changing its domain name, meaning twitter.com would always redirect to x.com going forward. Musk has also added xAI's chatbot Grok, intended to rival ChatGPT, to X and has begun training Grok on X user's posts by default. It's possible to opt out, but you'll have to navigate through your settings and uncheck a pre-selected box.