Since 2007, Twitterrific helped define the shape of the Twitter experience. It was the first desktop client, the first mobile client, one of the very first apps in the App Store, an Apple Design award winner, and it even helped redefine the word “tweet” in the dictionary. Ollie, Twitterrific’s bluebird mascot, was so popular it even prompted Twitter themselves to later adopt a bluebird logo of their very own. Our little app made a big dent on the world!

Today, Mastodon’s explosive growth in the face of Twitter’s collapse has made it a new UI playground, especially so on iOS. I’m following — and using — at least half a dozen excellent new iOS Mastodon clients, each of them distinctive.1 Mastodon has that small-nugget timeline nature as Twitter, but is a truly open platform. There are no limits to what developers can choose to do with the Mastodon APIs. There are, however, limits to what iOS developers can deliver to users: App Store review.