Twitter CEO Evan Williams announced earlier tonight that Twitter has “entered into an agreement with Atebits (aka Loren Brichter) to acquire Tweetie.” Williams noted that the decision was made to enable people to easily access Twitter from their iPhone and that “careful analysis of the Twitter user experience in the iTunes App Store revealed massive room for improvement.” Twitter plans to rename the app “Twitter for iPhone” and offer it for free as the official Twitter application for the iPhone platform.
Loren Brichter, developer of Tweetie, will join Twitter’s mobile team to support the continuing development of Twitter for iPhone and a future Twitter for iPad application.
In his own blog, Brichter describes his work on Tweetie as having been “an amazing ride” and mentions that he is really looking forward to working with Twitter to simplify the Twitter experience and create the next generation of mobile clients.