Automattic Acquires Poster App

In a short announcement it seems that Automattic has acquired Poster App, an iPhone / iPad publishing system that was built by Tom Witkin:

I’m elated to share that I, along with Poster, will be joining Automattic. I’ll be working with the mobile team where I’ll be both designing and coding.

So what’s changing? Poster will no longer be available for purchase, but if you’ve already bought the app you’ll always be able to re-download it. I’m continuing to support it, and I’m always just an email away if you’ve got any questions.

We’ve covered it before and I’ve used it myself – it’s a great app that really provided another beautiful way to publish to WordPress.

As one commentator writes:

Poster is one of my most used apps on the iPhone and iPad. I have developed several workflows for it, which leverage the app’s advanced features such as support for URL schemes, custom fields, and integration with browser bookmarklets.

It will be interesting to see which Poster features Automattic will decide to bring over to WordPress, and how. Automattic also acquired popular note-taking tool Simplenote earlier this year, and the service has continued to work albeit with no major additions or changes yet.

For now, I will keep Poster installed on my devices, as I believe it provides a superior posting experience than the official WordPress app. I am sad that we’ll never see a proper iOS 7 version of Poster, though.

I’m sorry to see it be removed as well – my biggest question is whether or not they’ll take the app and redeploy it again (under a different or same name) or just take pieces of it and apply that to the current WordPress iOS app.

Who’s to know? I haven’t heard any official report via Automattic themselves but I’m sure they’ll be something soon.

Thoughts on this acquisition? I had one quick exchange with another user who expressed my sentiments pretty well:

My big fear is that it’s just gone and we see some improvements to the current WordPress iOS app, but nothing that really puts it back on par with Poster.

Agreed. 100%.