When one of the big ones fall, about five little ones move up. We are predicting the same may happen upon news that one of Windows Phone's most popular Twitter clients, Carbon, has been discontinued. For those curious, the app was released just seven months ago in late February.

Explaining the decision on the official Carbon for WP7 Blog, developer dots & lines justify the decision as a combination of Twitter's restrictive new API guidelines, Windows Phone's small user base, and the impending release of their next project, Carbon for Android. It seems the most prevalent issue is the small number of sales, which dots & lines says only just covered their costs and did not generate any profit. While the initial plan was to rewrite the entire app, Carbon had not been updated since April due to a reallocating of their development resources. Apparently when the team realized the app would not be seeing any future updates, the decision was made to pull Carbon from the Store to avoid any new users from downloading and paying for a potentially broken app in the future.

You might have seen my blunt response to the news, and I still think now is the absolute worst time for any decently popular app to leave the platform ahead of a promising Windows Phone 8 hardware launch. However, it's hard not to sympathize with their decision, especially as a small independent development team with limited resources. Hopefully one day users can welcome Carbon back to Windows Phone with open arms, but in the meantime we wish them the best of luck with their Android release.

Source: Carbon for WP7 Blog