End of an era: Twitter will permanently block third-party clients (like Tweetbot)

After several days of uncertainty and one and a half announcements, Twitter has updated its terms of use and confirmed it won’t allow third-party clients. The company has quietly changed ANDsane developer, a contract that specifies what can and cannot be done with the API. There is now a paragraph in the document that prohibits the creation of products similar to the official application.

The update is in subsection A Reverse engineering and other restrictionswhich belongs to the section Restrictions on the use of licensed materials. It states that this is not allowed. use or access the licensed materials to create or attempt to create a substitute or similar product or service for the Twitter Apps..

Company confirmed yesterday that the blocking of third-party clients was due to compliance with their long-standing API rules. Indeed, these terms have been around for years, however Tweetbot, Twitterrific and other apps have been allowed. Version current at the time of publication tweet did not contain a new paragraph, as evidenced by copy kept in Return trip.

Twitterrific withdraws its apps and blames Twitter

The restriction takes effect from today, so all customers will stop working. At the time of this writing, only Twitterrific announced the end of its service. The Iconfactory blog post reports that the iOS and macOS apps have been removed from the App Store. The company also blaming Twitter for how it all went wrong.

We’re sorry to report that the app’s sudden and undignified disappearance is due to an unannounced and undocumented policy change by an increasingly fractious Twitter, a Twitter we no longer recognize as trustworthy and no longer want to work with.

twitter

The company warns that losing revenue from Twitterrific will seriously hurt business and that thousands of refunds will be devastating for a company of its caliber. Craig Hockenberry, head of the Iconfactory, went straight into the jugular vein of Space Karen (Elon Musk).

What worries me about the last day of Twitterrific is that he wasn’t worthy. Its creators weren’t notified in advance, clients got a strange error, and no one explained what was going on. We didn’t get a chance to thank the clients who have been with us for over a decade. Instead, it’s just another scene in his ongoing shit show.

Craig Hockenberry

Twitterbot says goodbye too

tweetbot.

Although Tweetbot stays on the App Store, users started leaving positive feedback with gratitude for all this time. Paul Haddad of Tapbots apologized in a Mastodon post. “What is now called Twitter does not bring me joy,” he said.

Finally, for some clarity, we appear to have broken the old rule of “using or accessing the Licensed Material to create or attempt to create a product or service that replaces or is similar to the Twitter Apps.” I guess I didn’t understand that “being long is actually “old”” means a couple of hours ago, again, I’m sorry.

Paul Haddad. cranebots

The transition to developer agreements marks the end of an era. Before the launch of the official app third party clients were the best option for using Twitter on mobile devices.. Although the company bought Atebits — the creators of Tweetie — Tweetbots and other apps have maintained an edge over the years.

Arrival from Elon Musk means an end to all the concessions that the social network has provided. The new CEO is desperate to make a profit before he loses all of his advertisers. The only way to achieve this is to force all of your users to use the official Twitter client.