Most of you know of Tweetbot, the new iPhone Twitter client from Tapbots. And if you haven’t heard of it, you owe it to yourself to give it a try. It’s well-worth $1.99 just to play with it and check out the visual design and user experience decisions that Mark and Paul made.
After launch, there was a minor kerfuffle with a couple of critical reviews of Tweetbot from Marco Arment and Benjamin Brooks, who are both fairly internet famous. And Paul posted a tweet that read like this:
“IMO if you don’t think UI/UX is a pretty differentiating feature you probably should be an Android user.”
If you hang around with Apple fans much, you’ll realize that comment is pretty much the equivalent of this.
A Disagreement With Ben
In the case of Ben’s argument, I simply don’t agree with him that the details that went in to Tapbots are insufficient to give it merit. He uses cars as a metaphor to convey what he’s trying to get across, so I’ll run with that.
My wife and I own a Subaru Outback, named Deborah (Please direct complaints to my wife.), which we’re in love with. (Perhaps there will be a separate post on this some day.) Here are a few reasons I’m in love with Debbie:
- When you cut the engine off, the car’s audio fades out instead of cutting to silence.
- The back seats fold completely flat and seamless when you lay them down.
- The shifter is sturdy and feels absolutely wonderful to the touch.
They’re features that aren’t earth-shattering, but in something I use every single day, they’re gold to me. The overall feature set is very similar to other cars in its class, but the details make it worth more than its peers to us.
At the end of the day, this is a value judgment, and that’s all right. Overall, I think Ben might agree with me on that (even though he comes to a different conclusion on the app), but it could have been communicated more clearly.
A Disagreement With Marco
I like Marco Arment more than the next guy. I’m an Instapaper evangelist, and when he speaks, I listen. I don’t think I’m alone. And I know Marco knows the value and difficulties that come with bootstrapping your own iOS development company.
That is to say his opinion is both well-informed and influential, and I think a lot of responsibility comes with that. My main squabble is with his writing and framing. For example, here is a quote from his piece:
Tweetbot is a very good app…
and another:
It really is very good.
But the title of this article is Tweetbot’s Limited Innovation, which is explicitly critical and creates dissonance with his defense of the article. It’s not to say an article can’t have a critical title and tone while noting a few positives, but the acuity of the criticisms the title can’t be dismissed so easily as Marco does in his tweet.
And I’ll quote his piece a little more liberally to illustrate my other issue:
A new Twitter client that essentially offers the Twitter app’s features, but in different places, isn’t enough of a difference for me to switch. If anything, it supports Twitter’s “don’t make full-featured apps” position. Maybe they were right.
This isn’t to say that Tweetbot shouldn’t exist as an option for people who really do like it a lot better than all of the other full-featured Twitter clients.
Here, he argues that their application’s features support Twitter’s recent announcement that they’re going to tighten the reigns on their ecosystem. And he says “maybe they were right”, presumably that they should limit what apps are allowed API access, but then he immediately follows with “This isn’t to say that Tweetbot shouldn’t exist…”
I find this particular critique much too harsh to be palatable and overall unfair, especially given the ulcers I’m sure the guys of Tapbots bear from worrying about whether Twitter would someday pull the plug on their beloved application.
A Disagreement With Tapbots
I’ve never poured months, maybe years, of my life into an application. And I’ve never fielded questions for months of “When will Tapbots be here? When will Tapbots be here?” and received fairly sharp criticism. So perhaps I’m not qualified to comment here, but I certainly think Tapbots could have responded in a more healthy manner.
What an opportunity to create good will and turn a negative into a positive. Something along the lines of the following personal responses could have been gold:
Hey Conscientious Dissenter, I appreciate you taking the time to write about Tweetbot, and I’m sorry version 1 didn’t meet your expectations. We were really looking to differentiate on user experience in this version, and we’re very proud of what we did. We have some great features planned down the road, and we hope you’ll revisit us in the future. In the interim, we felt your criticisms were a little bit harsh given the amount of love and effort that went into Tweetbot, and we hope your readers understand that for many of them, Tweetbot might be the Twitter client they’ve been waiting for.
From a business perspective, mitigating disaster is important. Rather than give influential members of the Apple community a proverbial kick-in-the-nuts with an Android barb, it would be a huge win if you could at least avoid keep them from publicly decrying you.
My Tweetbot Review
I honestly haven’t decided myself if Tweetbot will replace Twitter’s official client for me. It’s certainly fun and has some touches that make it an absolute pleasure to use.
But coming from a guy who usually leans to the side of sticking his fingers in his ears and crying, I wish both the reviewers and the developers would have been more supportive of one another in their evaluations and responses.
