There has been deafening silence on this one, however. This is most surprising at a time when Twitter’s current CEO, Elon Musk is quite active in posting musings, rants, polls, and policy changes to his followers (or bots, depends on which side of the coin you’re looking at), almost by the minute. It was part of Twitter’s larger effort to reach out to developers, particularly appreciating efforts which helped add features to Twitter. In 2021, Twitter which was then safely in the pre-Elon Musk era, had in-fact updated the developer agreement to remove a clause that discouraged app makers from developing and marketing Twitter clients. I guess I didn’t realize long standing actually means a couple hours ago, once again I’m deeply sorry,” says Paul Hadad, co-founder at Tapbots, makers of the Tweetbot client. “Finally, some clarity we apparently broke the long-standing rule of “use or access the Licensed Materials to create or attempt to create a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications”. “We are sorry to say that the app’s sudden and undignified demise is due to an unannounced and undocumented policy change by an increasingly capricious Twitter – a Twitter that we no longer recognize as trustworthy nor want to work with any longer,” writes the company, in a post. Twitterrific, which had been around since 2007, remained one of the most popular Twitter app alternatives in the 16 years of its existence. Third, and this is probably what irked the Elon Musk owned social media platform the most, is these clients were a nice way for users to bypass ad layers you may otherwise have seen.ĭevelopers are not impressed that their revenue stream has been blocked and apps rendered useless, with immediacy, after a swift update to the developer agreement. Second is the extra set of features and customisation that client apps could offer, which official Twitter apps didn’t. One is familiarity having used these for years. There are many reasons why users preferred these apps. In this case, third-party clients were using the API (and had been doing so for years) to give you access to your Twitter feed and messages, outside the Twitter app.Īlso Read: Twitter revenue dropped 40% YoY, over 500 advertisers have paused spending: Report Twitter on Thursday updated the developer agreement to include “use or access the Licensed Materials to create or attempt to create a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications” as part of the restrictions regarding Twitter API.ĪPI is a software layer, short for application programming interface, which allows two apps or platforms to communicate with each other. This means apps such as Twitterrific, Tweetbot, Fenix, Aviary, Birdie and Echofon, just to name a few, will no longer pull in new tweets. API is a software layer which allows two apps or platforms to communicate with each other. This has impressed no one, least of all developers who were locked out with no prior communication about any changes that were in the works. Twitter clients that you may have been using till now, will no longer work. After almost a week of bewilderment as access for some third-party apps was blocked, there is finally confirmation (or rules cobbled together at the last minute). It is becoming nigh impossible to Twitter to announce any changes in a dignified manner these days.
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