Twitter has finally confirmed what everyone already knew: that it’s behind the discontinuation of popular third-party Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Twitterific.
In a message posted to its Twitter Dev for Developers account, the company said: “Twitter is enforcing its longstanding API rules. That may result in some apps not working.” But he declined to provide details about which API rules the developers of the third-party apps have violated.
In response to the tweet, Tweetbot developer Tapbots said that their app “has been around for over 10 years, we’ve always complied with the Twitter API rules. If there are any existing rules that we must adhere to, we are happy to do so, if possible. But we need to know what it is… @TwitterDev you know how to contact us.”
Tweetbot, Twitterific, and other similar apps suddenly stopped working last week, forcing users to switch to the standard Twitter app or Twitter’s proprietary TweetDeck panel, or simply stop using the social media platform.
As of Tuesday, Twitter had not said anything about the outage, leading some to think a bug may have caused it. But as the problem persisted, suspicions grew that the block had been instigated by Twitter headquarters, possibly at the behest of the company’s new owner, Elon Musk.
This was practically confirmed on Saturday by informationwhich reported that it had seen recent internal messages on Twitter, including one from a senior software engineer who described the outage as “intentional.”
The view seems to be that Musk is not happy with third-party Twitter apps as they don’t display Twitter ads, a situation that affects the company’s ability to grow revenue, an ambition that its new owner has put at the forefront and to the center.
But Twitter’s lack of clarity is frustrating not only for the many people who have enjoyed using these apps for years, but also for the developers, who have put a great deal of time and effort into perfecting the software, with no objection from Twitter until now. now.
It’s unclear what developers can do to get back on track, as Twitter, at least publicly, hasn’t offered any details about the nature of the apparent API violation.
last month, musk said “Transparency is the key to trust.” It is what many now hope to get from him so that this current problem can be properly resolved.
Editors’ Recommendations
