"Dramatic Paul" Via Paul Haddad On Monday we spoke with Paul Haddad, the programmer behind Tweetbot, the best Twitter app in the App Store.

We asked Paul about what makes Tweetbot so good, and why tech fanatics are in a frenzy about it.

Part of the reason for the recent Tweetbot frenzy is that Twitter For iPhone 4.0 isn't so great for advanced Twitter users.

Tweetbot's price dropped from $2.99 to $0.99 to capitalize on the Twitter 4.0 bitterness, and has sold ten times as many apps per day since then.

(Paul wouldn't comment on specific numbers, but did say Tweetbot has sold six-figures worth of copies.)



Paul told us a bit about the decision to put Tweetbot on sale for the first time ever, his experience programming apps, his favorite parts of Tweetbot, what it's like dealing with Twitter, and even a little hint about a new app he's building.

See below for the full interview with Paul:

BI: Considering the $0.99 sale for the time being, how many more apps did you sell? Seems like most of the tech pundits hate Twitter 4.0 and have been pitching Tweetbot.

PH: So pre-sale but post Twitter 4.0's launch we did about 2.5x our usual volume. After the sale we've been running at 10x+. We're pretty happy about it. As far as Twitter 4.0, I think its a good move for them. They really aren't targeting their long time users, they are going after the new to Twitter crowd.

BI: Yeah, seems like it. It's strange that they're using Tweetdeck as a "Pro" offering on desktop, but not on mobile. Any idea why they'd do that?

PH: That app is really good at finding people to follow, discovering new things on Twitter. Stuff a new user would want to see. I'm not sure if that fits in to the same feature set a heavy Twitter user would look for.

BI: So how'd you settle on $2.99 for Tweetbot, the non-sale price?

PH: Just felt like a good price point for it. The old Tweetie was $2.99, a number of the full featured alternative Twitter clients are $4.99, though those have iPad versions as well. So we went with $2.99. It's very hard to tell what the optimum price point is.

BI: $0.99 per app is pretty cheap, even if that price point works well for music. It won't necessarily work so well when consumers demand that price from app developers.

PH: Yeah for a client like ours $0.99 isn't really sustainable, especially with push notifications and Google Translation.

BI: Is there any ballpark estimate you could tell us regarding overall sales for Tweetbot?

PH: We are comfortably in the 6 figures in terms of units sold.

BI: Did you see a bigger sales jump from the John Gruber endorsements [here and here], or from the Twitter 4.0 events last week?

PH: I'm guessing they both added to each other. Gruber has mentioned us in the past and that always has helped sales, but Twitter 4.0 probably made the biggest difference.

BI: Twitter's official app has always been decent enough for power users—until now, perhaps. Did you originally build Tweetbot because you wanted a better Twitter app?

PH: A Twitter client is the app both Mark and I use most on our phones, so we wanted to give it a shot. There were, and still are, quite a few good Twitter clients but at the time we decided to do Tweetbot the main competitors were Tweetie and Twitterrific. Mark preferred Tweetie, I preferred Twitterrific. But we both figured we could do something that we'd like better.

BI: Is it the most popular of the apps you've built?

PH: Both Convertbot and Weightbot have actually sold more, but both have been around much longer.

BI: Getting back to the actual product, we absolutely love the gestures and attention to detail inside Tweetbot. How did you guys decide on the UI? Few other apps we use take advantage of things like gestures the way you guys do.

PH: That's all pretty much Mark's doing. [Mark Jardine is Tweetbot's designer]. He has an amazing eye for little touches and how an app should feel. He decides almost all of it, I'll chime in with a suggestion here and there. I'll also tell him if something is very difficult/impossible to do and we'll go back and forth on other ways to accomplish certain things.

BI: Any little touches you are particularly proud of?

Tweetbot For iPhone. Apple

PH: Gestures can be tricky. They are really powerful, but often hard to discover. We try to make sure that anything that's doable by a gesture is also doable via a more traditional method. And we also try to highlight some of the best gestures when first launching the app. My favorite is the Swipe gestures, that came out really well. They are both fun to do and really useful.

BI: Any specific reason swipe right for conversation view, swipe left for replies? It just feels right.

PH: Well conversations are the past, so the idea is you are swiping backwards. We actually had some builds where the swipe popped back to the previous view and instead of a back button you'd see a forward button. Replies are more the future but because of the way Twitter's API works its not always that .

BI: How has dealing with Twitter been, by the way? They still being awkward to developers about making clients, etc?

PH: It's been much better over the last few months. I'm not sure they were ever harassing folks, I think it was just really bad communication. But regardless they've been really helpful over the last few months. The dev relations group in particular is great, I'm always pestering them with questions and bug reports.

There's still a view out there that they are actively against third parties and I just don't think that's the case.

We did work closely with them to make sure our iOS 5.0 Twitter integration worked really well. They took a lot of the early feedback we sent them and worked to improve the support. It's really cool to be able to launch Tweetbot for the first time and have all your account information ready for you.

BI: Yeah we were really impressed with that on day one. How early did you start working on the iOS 5 update?

PH: We started looking at it right after it was announced but the heavy nuts and bolts work was probably done a month or so before iOS 5 was released. Fortunately, after they made some API changes we were able to use the Twitter integration with very little code. Fit right in to how we did authentication and just works.

BI: What do you think you guys are doing better than competitors? It seems like nobody else has the full picture.

PH: Mark is just really picky about every little thing that goes into the app, so we probably take a lot longer than most other devs to get a particular feature done. We try really hard to either do something right or not do it at all.

We also take a lot of time to make sure that each new feature fits in with the rest of the app. We get a lot of requests that we end up saying no to because it would just clutter up the app. We're always walking a balance between adding new features and complicating the app.

BI: What's the top feature request you get?

PH: Tweetbot for iPad, but we don't talk about future projects. I didn't say we were or weren't doing it, just telling you that's our #1 request.

BI: So you don't want to drum up any buzz?

PH: We don't talk about upcoming apps because they are done when they are done and we don't want to hear 100+ tweets/emails a day asking when is XYZ coming. I will say that our next app should be out really early next year (hopefully).

BI: We will ask you this, though. Would you be opposed to doing an app on other platforms?

PH: Well there's a couple problems there. First is a total lack of time. We're only two guys we can't do any more than we are already doing. Tweetbot as an example took ~1 year to complete and its all Objective C code. To support another platform would require rewriting everything from scratch, which is a huge task.

Second, the only two "viable" mobile platforms out there are Android and Windows Phone. I hate Java and we both don't like the way Android looks. Windows Phone's market is just too small to risk anything there at this point.

It's hard to port big apps. We also have a ton of experience with iOS/UIKit/Cocoa so there'd be a pretty big learning curve.

BI: Lastly, we wanted to ask you about working remotely. We're not sure what kind of tech scene there is in Flower Mound, TX, but it seems like you're pretty actively engaged online.

PH: I've never been a fan of either coast and have been working from home for I think a decade now. I'm pretty spoiled. I'm not sure I could ever re-adjust to office life. I get my socialization once a year at WWDC and that is enough to keep me going for the rest.

BI: What do your 9,000 followers mean to you?

PH: It means I finally passed Mark after many months of trying. But not sure 9000 is that big of a number when folks have 100k+, that's a much bigger voice. I like Twitter because I can be sarcastic without getting yelled at, if I try it a home I get in trouble with the wife.