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Falcon Pro Developer Joaquim Vergès Joins Twitter To Improve Its First-Party App

Michael Crider
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Right now we're hearing about off-season trades and commitments for pro sports like the NFL, NBA, and NHL. A similar phenomenon has happened in the somewhat smaller world of Twitter clients for Android. Joaquim Vergès, the well-known developer of the Falcon Pro Twitter client, has been hired by Twitter itself. According to a series of tweets posted Friday afternoon, Vergès says that he's been hired specifically to work with the "Android core UI team."

Falcon Pro has won fans for being a full-featured Android client that outshines the first-party app in basically every respect, from interface to performance, even to supporting the built-in features of the Twitter platform itself. It's been Vergès reset the app entirely to enable people to continue to download and use it.

Twitter's policy of alienating third-party apps continues to be a sore spot in its relationship with the development community and end users. Vergès mentioned the limits of the system, particularly the limitations of Twitter's API, in a related Tweet.

According to yet another Tweet, Falcon Pro will continue to be developed by Vergès.

The developer has also released a combined RSS and social news reader, Flyne, but it hasn't been updated in the better part of a year.

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Comments

  • Lynton

    *Flyne

    • http://thegumshoe.com/ Michael Crider

      Whoops. Flyme is something else. (It's Meizu's manufacturer skin, but it sounds like some kind of throat condition.)

  • Gregory

    Does this mean that Falcon is going to become a free app?

    • Zsolt V

      Why should he deny himself a second income?

      • Gregory

        Why everybody thinks one can't have enough money?

        • David Onter

          Please, you can afford those 3.38€

          • Gregory

            I don't pay for software no matter how cheap it is.

          • David Onter

            Mmmmhhh. There is so much wrong with this statement...

          • Gregory

            What exactly is wrong with it? There's an opinion that any information, once created, can't have an owner and belongs to everyone. It's called infoanarchism. Why should I pay for a copy of a file if the said copy costs absolute zero to produce? That's just kinda insane.

          • David Onter

            Holy shit, it's worse than I thought.

          • Renaldi I.

            You are paying for the development costs and overhead that comes with developing, as well as giving them a little bit of profit, in exchange for a license to the software. You don't have a right to the information in that app that makes it work doesn't belong to you - that belongs to the creator of the app, who spent time making the app. The creator of the app allows you to legally use the software by paying him for a license.

          • Gregory

            Okay, there are some costs of development, but they are a finite number. By using this way of "licensing", the developer can earn an infinite amount of money once he incurred a finite cost of development. That's just unfair compared to other markets. It's like you built a factory and paid for that, but then it starts producing some items and each item produced costs zero, but you sell them for a dollar each. So physical items are paid legitimately since they consume some materials and/or services at the moment of production of each one. Virtual things like licenses are not, since they cost zero to produce.

            And no, information can't have an owner because of its nature. It's not a physical object like a car that indeed has an owner and can have its ownership transferred. Once you create and publish some information, there's no way you can control its distribution, no matter how hard you would like to, because copies of such information can be produced by anyone without involving the original creator AT ALL. There's no such thing like "right to the information" and copyright is a complete nonsense by definition. You can write a licensing agreement, but that's just a bunch of letters that doesn't guarantee anything.

            And I'm a developer myself BTW.

    • http://demodulated.com Brian Demodulated

      I doubt it. He made Falcon 3 a paid app to prevent the API keys from running out too quickly. It's worth the money!

      • Gregory

        Then he should allow users to use their own API ID like the Mac app does. That would kinda solve the problem completely for advanced users like me :)

        • http://demodulated.com Brian Demodulated

          He did that for his previous version of Falcon Pro which was pretty neat but probably too difficult for most users. Plus you can't blame a guy for wanting to earn money for his hard work.

  • skitchbeatz

    Welp there goes any new falcon pro updates

    • http://www.twitter.com/thewizkid95 Jesus Otero

      "Falcon stays with me. IMO It'll be a great place to try new experiments without the slowness of a big company."

      lrn2read

      • Zsolt V

        No way they are going let an employee make a direct competitor app. Don't be naive.

      • http://jrs.link Jack Smith

        Yeah, I'm sure he'll have time after a long day working with the official team on Twitter 45 hours a week to then run his own app.
        Any Falcon updates will be SIGNIFICANTLY longer to come out, if they do.
        They take forever at the moment. 8th July last update..

      • skitchbeatz

        Thanks for telling me exactly what I already read. I'm saying he's already updating the app quite infrequently. Working for a competing twitter app is going to make it worse.

  • numpty

    Hope he does a better job than he did of improving Falcon Pro, the new version wasn't nearly as good as the original.

    • brnpttmn

      It's getting there. I recently went back from Talon because of their tweetmaker implementation.

      • http://jrs.link Jack Smith

        Exactly. He's now going to take LESS time on Falcon, it won't get to the stage where V2 was. Ever.

        • brnpttmn

          Not sure that's true. If I recall, he's always struggled finding time for Falcon, so having a job developing for Twitter may actually help him spend more time on Falcon (since he's said it will be his place to experiment).

          • http://jrs.link Jack Smith

            He needs to finish the app, and make it half decent before experimenting.

  • http://www.twitter.com/thewizkid95 Jesus Otero

    Good for him. I knew that guy was going places back when Falcon was starting to be a thing. That app was the only reason I used twitter. Hope everything works out for him.

  • Leandro Brandão

    For me the official twitter app is perfectly fine, no complaints. What these third party apps have better than official app?

    • thedosbox

      Go try it for yourself. Falcon Pro has a limited demo that allows you to see what it can do.

      I happily paid for the latest version as it had a dark theme, excellent performance, clever list UI, and the ability to control whether media was auto-loaded.

      • Leandro Brandão

        In my carrier navigation in Twitter app or mobile site do not consume data, do you think that these third party apps will be the same?

        • http://jrs.link Jack Smith

          Hmm. I guess the APIs and such would go down a particular 'hole' in the internet that your carrier doesn't charge for? So as long as it's Twitter traffic it should be free..
          You should try and third party app. I use Fenix (gorgeous interface) and Tweetcaster (messy interface but very powerful, lets you schedule tweets etc).

  • Eumelanin Knight

    A dark official twitter maybe? Awww shyeeeaaa

    • Armand Agopian (Armdev)

      It just happened.

  • http://www.shadowhime.net/ Ryan

    I long switched to Fenix after v3 of Falcon Pro went pay-per-account to use it. I understand the meaning behind it, but at the same time, I don't particularly like the idea. Still, I don't regret purchasing the original v2, so..

  • Miku is Best Vocaloid

    Will Google ever hire Liam?

    • Zsolt V

      I think they hire software engineers, not hackers.

      • Miku is Best Vocaloid

        Google has software engineers?

        • Zsolt V

          Yup, not hackers working from their mother's basement

          • DuckingGold

            Don't be a twat your entire life.

          • Miku is Best Vocaloid

            Nice projection.

          • F4uzan

            And I'm pretty much sure what Liam does is UX and UI. Not programming a whole app.

      • http://AndroidPolice.com/ Liam Spradlin

        I'm neither a software engineer nor a hacker, so I guess the mystery continues.

  • http://www.ragtagtech.com Adrian Tomas

    awesome!

  • senor_heisenberg

    I really, really hope he's in a position that allows him to influence the design team and make the app material quickly. The current app, while not ugly or terrible, is very outdated.

  • godutch

    Twitter is the most useless website I have ever encountered, sometimes news sites linked to it as a reference, so I expect some background or more info but it's never there, just some useless headlines I just keep clicking on these Headlines but never have I found the full story.

    • http://thegumshoe.com/ Michael Crider

      Um... that's what Twitter is. Each individual message can't be longer than 140 characters. If the account obviously belongs to the relevant person, it's just like a quote from that person.

      I don't see any problem with using Vergès' statements at face value, unless you think he has some reason to be dishonest (which I don't).

  • ADofCLE

    Hell yes! The official app is so slow and poorly designed. Bringing in some that knows what they are doing is the best move twitter can do. Any of the third party developers would be a great asset to twitter to be honest.

    All of them are much nicer, and more fluid. I for one started using twitter because of the third party apps. I've tried them all, bought many of them, and even bought Falcon twice. Falcon Pro, and Falcon Pro 3. Let's hope he gets something done quickly. Falcon Pro 3's base was done in like a week.

  • mateor

    I _really_ wonder how he successfully negotiated the ability to retain and continue to improve a direct competitor. I basically had to sign away my ability to so anything even near the space I work in.

    This is very very standard contract stuff. If they were going to allow further work I would have expected an acquisition, not just a vanilla hire.

    • Eastern37

      It's really that much of a competitor though, people who use falcon pro are still using the Twitter service, not to mention Falcon Pro will never reach the amount of downloads the official app has!

    • http://twitter.com/trwnh trwnh

      Falcon Pro will remain for experiments and tests that couldn't be handled by the official client.

      • mateor

        Well sure, that is all well and good. But what happens when one of those experiments works out and twitter wants it? Who owns it then? You can't have it both ways, someone has to own the ideas and code in Falcon Pro.

        • http://twitter.com/trwnh trwnh

          If it works out, it'll also get implemented in the official Twitter app. I'm really not sure what your point is.

          • mateor

            My point is that employees are almost always banned from working on or contributing to competing products. This is because of questions of ownership...if my employee writes a cool feature for a competing product did he do it on my time or his own? Who owns it?

            He says he got an exemption and that's cool. I am curious what the exact arrangement is. Your bet is that Twitter has arbitrary cherry-pick rights and can take what they want when they want. I bet you are probably right, but then what's the point? Why not go through the beta-channel? Anyway...

          • Jeremy Techtmann

            Twitter is pretty good about things like this from what I have read. Bootstrap is a great example of this. Developed in-house and left with the two employees who developed it when they left. They are also a very open (sourced) company, just look at their github account.

          • mateor

            I very much agree.

  • http://jrs.link Jack Smith

    So Falcon is dead now?

    Not that I mind, Falcon 3.0 was an incomplete scam, I've been using Fenix and Tweetcaster for a while now..

  • bL4Ck

    Please update flyne!

  • Paolo T.

    Considering the bureaucracy with working at something like Twitter, DO NOT expect even a decent improvement in the official app or how Twitter bullies (or otherwise) third-party apps for a long, long time...

  • http://brandon.giesing.cf Brandon Giesing

    How I think he should do it:
    -Take Falcon Pro and add "official API"
    - Re-brand it to Twitter
    - Upload to Twitter Play Store listing.
    - Use Twitter's Alpha and Beta channels for those "experiments"
    - Hide Falcon Pro listing from new users.

  • lramesha

    It is good twitter recogined a talented developer, wished that facebook/whatsapp should have hired rafalsense

  • meelyg

    Falcon 3rd party Twitter client.
    Still a more profitable operation than Twitter corp lol.

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