Announcing Socialite end of life

History

Ever since we acquired Socialite from Realmac Software in December 2010, we have been planning on releasing a faster, more stable version 2. Months of work had gone into making Socialite 1 better. Then we shifted our focus to the development of Socialite 2. Since then, including some unsuccessful attempts, we’ve invested tens of thousands of dollars into its development and months of our time.

In June 2012 Twitter announced API changes and made it clear that traditional Twitter clients, such as Socialite, should not be developed. Some of these new rules made developing Twitter support in Socialite 2 impossible, so after much deliberations, we had decided to stop the development of Socialite 2, but to continue the support of the current version of Socialite.

Since then, keeping Socialite users in mind, we have tried to find a buyer for Socialite. A buyer that could give it a new home, invigorate it and create a new roadmap. But our efforts have been in vain. No such buyer was found, and we decided to continue supporting Socialite in its current form, mainly for its users’ sake.

Recent end-of-life of Google Reader was the last nail in the coffin of Socialite, as without it Socialite loses much of its appeal.

The announcement

The increasing amount of work that updating Socialite required, prevented us from giving proper attention to the development of our other applications and stopped us from creating new exciting applications. At the same time, declining sales and lack of a feasible roadmap made little sense to invest even more resources into Socialite.

Following these developments, we regretfully have to announce the end-of-life of Socialite application starting today. We are deeply sorry that Socialite came to this bitter end, and we understand the frustration of loyal Socialite users. We did our best to make it work, but to all things there is a beginning and an end, and this is the end of Socialite. Hopefully, it will also be a beginning of something else.

Logistics

What will change:

  • We will stop selling Socialite both on our website and on the Mac App Store
  • We will not release new versions of Socialite
  • We will not keep Socialite up-to-date with API changes of supported services, so going forward some services may stop working
  • We will not provide technical support to Socialite starting November 2013
  • Users who have purchased Socialite from our website starting June 1st 2013 are entitled to a refund. Contact us at http://support.apparentsoft.com/ and we will process your refund immediately. Unfortunately, Apple does not let us provide refunds to customers who purchased Socialite from Mac App Store.

What will stay the same:

  • The latest version will continue to be available for download from our website
  • We will continue to provide limited licensing support for existing users
  • We will provide limited technical support for existing users until the end of October 2013, to give them time to migrate to alternative solutions, like:
  • Hootsuite for power users of Facebook and Twitter
  • Tweetbot for Twitter
  • Feedly or ReadKit for RSS
  • Facebook website for Facebook
  • Flickery for Flickr

It’s been a long ride, and it has been a pleasure to have such enthusiastic users.

Jacob and Kosta Apparent Software

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