Users and developers of Twitter’s third-party clients were both surprised last week when many popular apps, such as Tweetbot, suddenly stopped working. Twitter continues to belittle developers today, this time with a shaky explanation of what’s going on with its API.
In a new tweet published to the official Twitter Dev profile, which is dedicated to offering helpful information for developers using the Twitter API, the firm stated that it is enforcing its enduring API limitations. As a result, it admits that some apps “do not work.”
The statement does not specify which rules are being changed or enforced, or why the company did not notify Twitter’s third-party client developers of the change in advance.
On January 12, many Twitter users noticed that third-party clients were returning error messages related to the Twitter API. This widespread outage affects all third-party apps on iOS, macOS, Android, and Windows, including Tweetbot, Twitterrific, Fenix, Talon, and many others.
Despite Twitter’s silence, The Information learned from Twitter employees that access to third-party apps was intentionally suspended. Developers later discovered that the company had restricted API access to specific clients such as Tweetbot and Fenix, while other less popular apps continued to function normally.
