Icebird Is Now A Codenauts App

We are happy to announce that Icebird for iPhone is now a Codenauts app. We hope to continue the great work @fabiankr has done when creating Icebird and will do our best to move the app forward.

If you haven't heard about Icebird yet, you should check out this page: www.icebirdapp.com.

Transition Phase

Buying an iOS App from someone else isn't an easy task due to some restrictions of the App Store. Most important: you can't move an existing app to a different developer account. This means that if you want to get updates to all existing users, you have to update the existing app in the existing account. Leaving the app in Fabian's account would mean that all financial transactions would continue to run through him, which makes things complicated in several ways.

So here is our plan which hopefully is the best for everyone.

• We just submitted Icebird Lite as a new app in our own App Store account. The app will be free of charge for the foreseeable future.
• We will issue an update to the existing Icebird app which will inform all users about the new Icebird Lite app and suggest downloading it.
• We will remove the existing app in a few weeks.

If you already use Icebird, you probably know that the direct message support is currently broken. This is because the app implemented the old xAuth authentication process for the Twitter API. Therefore the new Icebird Lite app will use the OAuth authentication process and direct messages will be working again! We also fixed a few minor iOS 5 issues and added the HockeySDK to get more information about crashes.

And don't get fooled by the name, Icebird Lite has all the features of the existing Icebird App. We only choosed Lite to have a better distinction as soon as Icebird 2.0 is ready.

What's next?

We have already started working on Icebird 2.0, which will be a new app and sold separately to Icebird Lite.

Here are some things we plan for 2.0:

• Shake the dust of Icebirds plumage
• Tweetmarker support
• Use of the Twitter accounts in iOS 5
• Performance, Performance, Performance!

We are also thinking about the following features, but haven't made a decision yet:

• Push Notifications
• Inline images
• Mute filter

If you miss a feature or have other suggestions, please send us a tweet to @icebirdapp or comment below. We hope that Icebird Lite gets approved soon.

tl;dr

Icebird is now called Icebird Lite, it's the same app, no ads and no features removed. It will be free. We are working on Icebird 2.0 which will sold as a second app soon as it is ready

Comments

[Levi Figueira]

Who are you fooling? You chose Icebird Lite because you want to upsell to Icebird 2.0. You could have called this app Icebird, called it 1.5, have it for free in the AppStore for a couple of months, emailed all Icebird users (through Fabian, probably) to inform of the change/update, then released 2.0 as a free upgrade while changing the the price for newcomers.

I'm sorry to inform you but Icebird has lost its attraction and window. Twitter will be soon screwing all third-party apps and, right now, Twitterrific, Tweetbot, Echofon and Twittelator are more than enough apps in this market.

I was a huge Icebird "evangelist" but I believe most of us have moved on… :(

[Codenauts]

Hi Levi,

thanks for your comment.

Sadly, we can't email all users as we have not a single email address. We simply don't know who bought the app or not. We chose the different name as Apple doesn't allow to have 2 apps with the same name in the App Store. We could have removed the original Icebird, but then we would have had no chance to inform existing users via the description or an in-app-view.

Icebird Lite will be free, so our first action was to lower prices, not to increase them. It contains all features of the original app. We haven't decided yet on the pricing model for Icebird 2 and how we ease the transition for existing customers. We will let you know via Twitter and this blog when we are ready.

Kind regards,

Thomas

[Gionata]

Hi, i 'll love to see timeline auto-link system in our app, i hate open ALL tweets in extended view for open one link!!

[Codenauts]

Hi Gionata,

thanks for your comment. We have that on our list of features for the 2.0.

Stefan

[j_breez]

I think it would be great if you guys added like a swipe a tweet to reveal actions option, posting to facebook and a tweet music one and the ability to see who all retweeted or replied to a tweet. Other than that I'd say the app is pretty much great.