Retiring Twitter Web - Night Mode extension

tl;dr - Official version of twitter web night mode is out and I’m retiring the extension. You can uninstall the extension (no, I’m not crying) if you’ve got the official one. If not, you can continue to use the extension till you get it.

So the day has come to shut down the app that’s so close to me. It’s been more than a year since I launched Twitter Web - Night mode extension for Chrome & Firefox. Yeah, twitter has rolled out the official version of night mode for the web app and there is no point in using the hacky extension for the same purpose. It’s always going to be hard to keep up the night mode (extension) working with all the changes twitter is making to the website and the extension is always going to be buggy.

This is my first “real” open source thing which attracted a quite a lot of users and a few contributors. It’s been a wonderful experience working on this extension. Though the user base was only a few hundred in first few weeks, the extension got quite popular when a couple of sites posted about the extension. Heck, there are a couple of videos (one in Hindi!) on YouTube on how to get night mode on twitter web using this extension.

At the time of writing this, it has about 68K users on Chrome, 3.5K users on Firefox, and 2.3K on Opera. And 46 people have starrted it on GitHub with 8 contributors.

And to my surprise, someone offered to buy the extension. I didn’t want to sell, because I have read this story of Amit Agarwal and know what they’ll probably do!

Coming back to retiring the extension, I’m not going to take it off from all the stores right away. I will not be fixing any open / future issues. For the benefit of users, I’ll be showing a notification banner on twitter.com for all users who’re using the extension for night mode once in a week to let them know that the official night mode is out so that they can uninstall (:try_not_to_cry:) the extension.

I’m thankful to all those who used the extension (and being patient with the bugs), rated the extension and shared reviews, created issues on GitHub, shared it on twitter & other medium and last but not the least, those who made time to contribute to the code. Only regret I have about this project is that I never got (or made) time clean up the messy code I put together over a weekend :(

Would love to hear from you in the comments or @tsriram