4th & Mayor has ousted the official foursquare app as mayor on Windows Phone 7 — at least for now

Today, Microsoft and foursquare quietly changed their download links for the Windows Phone 7 foursquare app to point to Jeff Wilcox’s highly rated 4th & Mayor app. The official foursquare app is no longer available, at least for the time being.

In a post on the Microsoft on ISVs blog, Liz Ngo from the Microsoft Global ISV Team said:

Over the last year, we have discovered and learned from many of you that Windows Phone 7 is a great leap for Microsoft.  In the spirit of this, foursquare will soon unveil a new foursquare mobile app that will take advantage of some of the unique capabilities, features, and experience for Windows Phone 7.

Until then, we encourage you to explore a great foursquare application, built by a 3rd party developer, called 4th and Mayor. It includes rich functionality like photos, comments, new leaderboards, the Explore feature! Download it today by visiting  https://foursquare.com/apps/ and clicking on the Windows Phone logo in the upper right corner of the page.

Keep up the enthusiasm, keep up the dedication, and we will continue to keep you posted as we continue to develop the new official foursquare mobile app for Windows Phone 7.

The official foursquare app never saw any significant updates beyond its initial release, which predated new features like Explore, photos and comments. 4th & Mayor includes almost all the same features as foursquare 3.0 on iPhone and Android. Wilcox initially made it free instead of a premium app when the official foursquare client stopped working in early March. Interestingly, the official app was fixed just a few hours after Wilcox released 4th & Mayor.

The official app was originally built by Microsoft (or a third party they paid) to ensure that foursquare was available on Windows Phone 7 when it launched. Wilcox is a Microsoft employee, but from a different division. He’s been in contact with the team building the new version and says “they’re hard at work to bring a great experience in the new app.”

Pointing to 4th & Mayor instead of the feature-poor official app is a good move by Microsoft to make sure users a getting a good experience on their operating system, which is more important at this point that promoting their own app. It will be interesting to see what “unique capabilities and features” they’ll be taking advantage of in the new version.