Why You Can’t Use Your Favorite Twitter App Anymore
Over the past few days, Twitter has shut down API access for several major third-party apps. What prevents users from accessing their favorite apps.
It’s been a few days since you won’t be able to use your favorite app to access Twitter. A rule change that forces certain historical apps to simply shut down their services overnight.
In a message posted on Thursday, January 19, the Twitterrific app explained that “ forced to remove the app from the Mac and iOS App Stores “. He explains that he regrets Twitter’s decision:Unexplained termination of our access to the Twitter APIs“. The same goes for Tweetbot, Fenix, Talon, Echofon, or other apps that allow you to access Twitter’s timeline without going through the home app. A week ago, Tweetbot explained that “Tweetbot and other clients are having trouble connecting to Twitter. We reached out to them for more information but did not hear back.“.
Tweetbot and other clients are having trouble accessing Twitter. We reached out to Twitter for more details, but have not heard back.
We hope this is a temporary glitch and we will let you know more once we have more information.
— Tweetbot (@tweetbot) by Tapbots January 13, 2023
The explanation is simple: Twitter updated its terms partnership with developers using its APIs — its programming interface. What prevents you from developing an alternative service to the main application. After that, it is stated in Article II-Ac of these conditions:
You will not use or access the Licensed Content to create or attempt to create any service or product similar to or alternative to the Twitter applications.
Specifically, this new rule, which was integrated on Thursday, January 19, prevents developers from creating third-party applications, even if some have become real companies for several years.
Twitter owes a lot to third-party apps
Twitter owes a lot to these third-party apps. name “tweet– messages posted on the social network – thus coming from the Twitterrific application before being received by the social network. The same goes for managing hashtags or retweets that are first natively integrated by third-party apps before Twitter accepts them natively. This also applies to the function to stop seeing the user’s messages, which was adopted by Tweetbot and Twitterrific before the social network itself. Even Twitter’s blue bird logo comes from a third-party app: Twitterrific. First of all, Twitter took years to launch on Android. The first official Twitter application dates back to 2010. Previously, users had to go through a third-party client.
However, even before Elon Musk took over Twitter late last year, Twitter had a reputation for making life difficult for third-party developers. So French entrepreneur Loïc Le Meur launched Seesmic in 2007 and was eventually acquired by Hootsuite in 2012. He explained to the site a year laterFrenchwebTwitter could sometimes put spokes in its wheels to prevent Seesmic from becoming better known than Twitter: “We were friends of Twitter, supported by their teams in our development, while growing significantly to become alternative ways to read tweets.“.
The fallout from Twitterrific, which announced it will be closing its doors this week, is just as bitter: “We’re sorry to say that the sudden and embarrassing shutdown of the app is due to an unannounced and undocumented policy change by the increasingly emboldened Twitter — a Twitter we no longer trust and no longer want to work with.“.
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