Twitter apps are still broken and Musk is still silent

guest · Jan 14, 2023

By Mitchell Clark - January 13, 2023

It’s been about a day since pretty much every major third-party Twitter client broke, and developers say they still haven’t heard anything from the company about what’s going on. The issues seemed to begin on Thursday evening, with some users reporting that they were getting errors related to authentication.
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The silence from the company has been pretty much complete. “Still no official/unofficial info from inside Twitter,” said Tweetbot co-creator Paul Haddad in a Mastodon post. “We’re in the dark just as much as you are,” read a Friday blog post from Iconfactory, the company behind Twitterific.

As of Friday evening, there haven’t been any tweets about the plight of third-party apps from either the official Twitter account, the Twitter Support account, or Elon Musk. (So much for “transparency builds trust.”) The company doesn’t have a communications department that we could ask about the issue directly.
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Update January 13th, 9:05PM ET: Updated to reflect that it’s now been around a day since the issues started, and to note Twitter’s continued silence.
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roger_m · Jan 15, 2023

No loss in my opinion.

guest · Jan 15, 2023

mood said: ↑

By Mitchell Clark - January 13, 2023
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Update:

However, a Saturday report from The Information appears to confirm that the outage is deliberate.
According to The Information, another employee asks when they can get a list of “approved talking points” in response to complaints about third-party apps not working on Friday. A product marketing manager reportedly replies by saying that Twitter has “started to work on comms,” but that they aren’t sure when that information will be ready to share with developers.

Haddad says his company will be operating under the assumption that the outage is on purpose, and the Iconfactory post points out the possibility of “a new (seemingly unstated and unannounced) policy that is only being applied to apps with large numbers of users.”
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Third-party apps rely on Twitter’s API to get data from the service, a point that’s been contentious in the past as the company went through a period where it neglected tools for outside developers.

It’s hard to tell whether the third-party client outage is due to the API. Attempting certain calls from my individual Twitter developer account seemed to work, while Twitter’s own API explorer tool is currently broken.
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Update January 14th, 8:45AM ET: Updated to reflect that been a few days since the issues started, as well as to include a report from The Information that indicates the outage is “intentional.”
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Update January 14th, 11:58AM ET: Updated to add that some third-party apps are displaying notifications about the outage to users.
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guest · Jan 15, 2023

Tweetbot is (mostly) working again
By Emma Roth - January 15, 2023

Tweetbot is mostly up and running after an outage locked users out of major third-party Twitter clients. While users can now sign in to Tweetbot and browse through tweets, some say they still can’t post anything to Twitter through the service without getting an error message stating they’ve reached a “data limit.”
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The client isn’t back online because of anything that Twitter did, though. Tweetbot co-creator Paul Haddad tells The Verge that they still haven’t heard anything from Twitter, so they’ve “decided to start using new API keys and see if it fixes the problem.” This could allow Tweetbot to temporarily avoid any disruptions to the service, even if it puts it in a semi-working state.

As pointed out by iOS developers Mysk, Tweetbot is likely having issues because it’s using different API keys that put significantly lower limits on its activity. “Twitter API restricts new apps to low limits,” Mysk explains. “All Tweetbot users now share a limit of 300 posts per 15 minutes.”
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Tweetbot is back down again
By Emma Roth - January 16, 2023

Update, 7:10PM ET: Updated to reflect that Tweetbot is now down again.
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Tweetbot is down again. The Twitter client briefly became available in the midst of an outage that locked users out of major third-party Twitter clients.

While users could sign in to Tweetbot and browse through tweets, some said they couldn’t post anything to Twitter through the service without getting an error message stating they’ve reached a “data limit.” But now users say they can’t sign in at all.

“And now dead again, along with some old unused API keys, which proves that this was intentional and we and others were specifically targeted,” Tweetbot co-creator Paul Haddad writes on Mastodon. “I wouldn’t have swapped out the keys in the first place if there was even a shred of communication.”
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guest · Jan 16, 2023

Twitter’s third-party client issue is seemingly a deliberate suspension
By Ivan Mehta @indianidle - January 16, 2023

Last Friday, a ton of popular Twitter clients including Tweetbot, Twitterrific, and Echofon were down. Users couldn’t log into their accounts or look at their timelines. At first, it looked like a bug in Twitter API, but radio silence from Twitter and new details indicated that the company deliberately limited access to third-party apps.
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The issue
On Friday, late evening PST time, many users noticed that they could not access their third-party Twitter clients. The app makers quickly acknowledged the issue and said that they had been trying to contact the company.

A Japan-based developer noted at the time that many smaller Twitter clients were working without any glitches. Many folks in the community speculated that it could be an issue with the API or that the company is limiting access to larger clients.
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The radio silence
While developers and users expected Twitter to communicate with them in some ways, the company and its new owner Elon Musk maintained radio silence about the problem. However, the Tesla CEO tweeted everything ranging from the latest Falcon Heavy launch to building transparency on Twitter by publishing the platform’s tweet recommendation code.
Internal messages on Twitter indicated that shutting down certain third-party clients was a company decision rather than a bug, The Information reported over the weekend.
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Developer frustration
Since the beginning of the saga, many developers have expressed their frustrations on Twitter and Mastodon.

Fenix developer Matteo Villa said on Twitter that he is considering pulling the client from the App Store— which is working at the time of writing — because he fears that the client might stop working at a point.

And I'm honestly thinking of also pulling Fenix for iOS from the app store.
People are still downloading it, and who knows if or when it'll stop working.
— Matteo Villa (@mttvll) January 15, 2023
A bunch of these developers were concerned about handling refunds for folks who have subscribed to the pro or premium versions of their apps if Twitter banned third-party clients. That would also mean that their annual income would go down and they would have to build new products while making no money.
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guest · Jan 17, 2023

Twitter admits it’s breaking third-party apps, cites ‘long-standing API rules’
By Karissa Bell @karissabe - January 17, 2023

Several days after Twitter abruptly cut a number of third-party apps off from its API, the company has quietly acknowledged the move. “Twitter is enforcing its long-standing API rules,” the company said in a tweet from its developer account. “That may result in some apps not working.”
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However, the company offered no explanation which “long-standing API rules” developers of apps like Twitterrific and Tweetbot were violating. It also doesn’t address why some smaller third-party Twitter apps are still up and running. Twitter no longer has a communications team.

The company’s two-sentence acknowledgement that it had cut off access to several longtime developers follows a report in The Information that the moves was an “intentional” one.
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For now, Twitter developers say they are in the dark about why Twitter has cut them off. "We haven't heard anything from Twitter," Twitterrific creator Craig Hockenberry told Engadget. "We have been respectful of their API rules, as published, for the past 16 years. We have no knowledge that these rules have changed recently or what those changes might be."

Tweetbot maker Tapbots responded similarly. "Tweetbot has been around for over 10 years, we've always complied with the Twitter API rules," the developer said. "If there's some existing rule that we need to comply with, we'd be happy to do so, if possible. But we do need to know what it is..."
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guest · Jan 19, 2023

Twitter’s new developer terms ban third-party clients
The company quietly updated its terms a week after cutting off prominent app makers.
By Karissa Bell @karissabe - January 19, 2023

In case there was any doubt about Twitter’s intentions in cutting off the developers of third-party apps, the company has quietly updated its developer agreement to make clear that app makers are no longer permitted to create their own clients.
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The “restrictions” section of Twitter’s developer agreement was updated Thursday with a clause banning “use or access the Licensed Materials to create or attempt to create a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications.” The addition is the only substantive change to the 5,000-word agreement.

The change confirms what the makers of many popular Twitter clients have suspected in recent days: that third-party Twitter services are no longer permitted under Elon Musk’s leadership.
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guest · Jan 20, 2023

Twitterrific and other clients begin offloading their apps after Twitter shuts them out
By Ivan Mehta @indianidle - January 20, 2023

Twitterrific, one of the most iconic third-party Twitter clients, said today that it has removed the iOS and Mac apps from the App Store. Iconfactory, the company that made Twitterrific, said in a blog post that under Elon Musk’s management, the social media network has become “a Twitter that we no longer recognize as trustworthy nor want to work with any longer.”
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The app has had a rich association with Twitter. It was one of the first mobile and desktop clients for the platform, and it helped form the word “Tweet”. In fact, Twitterrific was built back in 2007 — even before Twitter made its own iOS app.

Twitterrific’s demise comes after Twitter intentionally started blocking third-party clients last Friday without any explanation. Earlier this week, the TwitterDev account posted that the company had been suspending these apps in breach of “its longstanding API rules.” But it didn’t specify what rules were broken.
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But Twitterrific is not alone. A ton of other apps have started to remove or preparing to remove their apps from different app stores. Paul Haddad, who is a co-creator of Tweetbot told TechCrunch in an email that the company has already pulled the Mac client from the App Store and the iOS app will follow soon.

Despite Twitter’s announcement, some Twitter clients are still working, but it’s probably just a matter of time before the company suspends them.

Twitter has clarified their position. From this point on, apps that attempt to recreate the Twitter experience will not be allowed to access Twitter services. Unfortunately, this ultimately means that Talon will cease to work.https://t.co/48hr1SflYE
— Talon (@TalonAndroid) January 20, 2023
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guest · Jan 22, 2023

The third-party apps Twitter just killed made the site what it is today
By Mitchell Clark - January 22, 2023

The age of great third-party Twitter clients may be over. After Twitter cut off their API access and changed its rules to bar apps that compete with its own, The Iconfactory has announced that it’s discontinuing Twitterific, Fenix has been pulled from app stores, and Tapbots has posted a memorial for Tweetbot. It’s a loss for all the people who used the apps and, almost certainly, a loss for Twitter itself.
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As many people have pointed out over the past week, third-party clients helped make Twitter the platform it is today, innovating parts of Twitter we take for granted and, in the early days, helping form the company’s very identity. They’ve also acted as a safe haven from unwanted changes, helping to keep people tweeting when they were ready to give up on the platform.

Third-party apps have had a massive impact on how we use smartphone apps in general, not just Twitter.
Third-party client users, who numbered in the millions in 2018, often enjoyed features years before they came to the official app.
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Elon Musk just decided to throw all of that away. Twitter has abruptly cut itself off from that stream of ideas — the stream that produced its apps, some of its most popular features, and much of its core identity. Even if he backtracks, why would developers spend their best ideas on a company that’s burned them so badly?
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