John Gruber reports that he received an email from an iPhone developer claiming to have been offered “a bucket of money” to port his popular Twitter application to the Zune.

I got an email from the developer of an iPhone Twitter client. He was contacted by Microsoft a few months ago, with an offer to port his app to the Zune in exchange for “a bucket of money”. He turned them down, but assumes, as I do, that Microsoft reached out to the developers of multiple popular iPhone apps.

This means that Microsoft clearly does have applications on the roadmap for the Zune. This doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone since it would be hard to compete with the iPod touch, whose killer app is the App Store, without an app platform of your own. What is surprising (but shouldn’t be) is that Microsoft was willing to throw money at the problem by attempting to convince iPhone developers to build for the Zune.

Previously:
8/12/09: Zune HD Coming September 15
7/12/09: Zune HD Marketplace Pictured
5/27/09: Zune HD Coming This Fall

Update 8/23/09: Zune HD’s “Apps” menu item spotted in the Marketplace, still short on details

Update 9/17/09: Zune HD

Update 12/20/09: Zune HD Twitter Application Originally Censored Tweets