Paul Haddad

Paul Haddad is an app developer best known as the co-founder and lead developer of Tapbots, the tiny studio behind Tweetbot, the Mastodon client Ivory, Pastebot and Calcbot. He builds the apps; his co-founder Mark Jardine designs them, giving each a playful robot personality.

Haddad discovered NeXT computers in college, bought one and kept coding on NeXTSTEP for years; his first real job was on an object-oriented wrapper for reinsurance software. He then spent several years as a contractor before working at Oakley, where he met Jardine around 2007. When Apple opened the iPhone SDK in 2008 he asked Jardine to help design a friendlier weight-tracking app, inspired by Wii Fit and the robot Eve from WALL-E. Weightbot and the unit converter Convertbot followed, and the pair soon quit their jobs to build apps full time. Pastebot, an iPhone clipboard manager, was conceived on the last day of WWDC 2009.

Tapbots' biggest hit was Tweetbot, launched on April 14, 2011. Known for its gestures, sounds and custom timelines, it became one of the most popular Twitter clients on iPhone, iPad and Mac, moving to a subscription model with Tweetbot 6 in 2021. On January 12, 2023, Twitter cut off third-party clients without notice, and on January 19 Tweetbot was pulled from the App Store.

Tapbots was ready with a successor. It had announced Ivory, a Mastodon client, in late 2022 and released it in January 2023, followed by Ivory for Mac on May 23, 2023, sold through subscriptions. Tapbots remains a three-person company, with Haddad, Jardine and developer Todd Thomas living in North Texas and Canada, and it still maintains Pastebot and Calcbot while working on a new Weightbot.

Haddad is a key figure in the indie Apple scene: a developer whose small, bootstrapped studio helped define what a polished third-party social app could be, and who rebuilt the business after a platform took it away.