They aren't some poor dev struggling to eat and pay bills, they've been one of the most popular third party Twitter apps for 15 years. They are not down.
Sure, build your app with dependency on software from Twitter, because looking back their relationship to developers has been so great until now, and surely they won't abandon this project after two years...
For Twitter third party clients are basically competition so it's not surprising that they make API access as limited as possible. Furthermore because of network effects they are not afraid that a significant number of people will leave the platform.
You don't have an app if you build around the twitter API. Twitter has another app that you maintain. It's not YOUR business, it's theirs, and they can hold it for ransom anytime they want.
Did you miss when Twitter explicitly told developers not to make any more third-party Twitter clients? The situation is simple, and just as the comment you replied to states.
If I didn’t have a good third party client (no ads, no sponsored tweets, all chronoligical) I would have left Twitter long ago. I don’t get how people can stand using the official apps.
You pay $5 for Tweetbot, and they work delivering updates for years before asking for another (usually b/c of many new features or hard work updating the UI for modern iOS)
It's one of the most polished apps around. You don't owe the Developer's time indefinitely from one $5 purchase, and you're free to move to an alternative. I'm happy to continue to support the apps I love -- they generally aren't asking a whole lot.
Additionally, in the case of Twitter clients, they also can't add a lot of new customers b/c Twitter has capped their allowed clients. If they didn't charge customers again, they wouldn't be able to sustain the work with new ones.
Twitter's basic problem is that they opened up to third party clients back while they were still growing, and those third party clients quickly outpaced them in new usage features.
Twitter has been trying to reign that in since (various things their official client can do is not accessible via the public APIs), but they can't just drop their third party support or they would see the usage rates dwindle in no time flat.
You are totally misreading the situation. They are FORCED to shut down the product because Twitter just changed their terms of service today and banned all 3rd party apps. There is nothing else to do, there is no "choice" here. 3rd party client apps are not allowed by the API terms of service, that's it.
Do you feel that your Twitter experience isn’t that great as it is when you have some wonderful third party applications around to help you do some of the most exciting things which can’t be enjoyed otherwise?
reply