A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the surprisingly small amount of third-party Bluesky clients for iOS. After countless Twitter ones and now plenty of Mastodon options, it felt inevitable. Except very few developers seemed to be working on anything.

For months, users (including me) had been holding out hope that Tapbots, the makers of Ivory and the now sunsetted Tweetbot, would make a Bluesky client. Much to my surprise, yesterday they announced Phoenix, the Bluesky counterpart to Ivory. I am extraordinarily excited about this app. Having been a champion for Bluesky and Tapbots products, this is an awfully fun development for me. While they did not share any screenshots and it seems to be fairly early, in fact they don’t expect to start releasing anything until this summer, they did share a gorgeous new logo and a reddish orange take on their iconic robotic bird. It is not hard to imagine that Phoenix could be nearly identical to Ivory for the most part with tweaks to accommodate some platform specific features. After all Ivory is very similar to the final version of Tweetbot with changes for Mastodon’s unique structure.

Congrats to the Tapbots crew. I think this is going to be a great new product for their portfolio and it expands their potential user base by quite a substantial amount. And before I leave you, I just have to hit on the name Phoenix. It is such a perfect moniker for a Bluesky client, particularly one made by the team who created Tweetbot. It was devastating to lose that app a few years ago and with Bluesky having been born out of Twitter itself, it is only natural that it should be named for the mythical bird that dies in a fiery catastrophe, only to rise right up out of those ashes even better than before.