Twitter’s sudden ban on third-party apps is baffling as it is stupid
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If you found that apps like Twitteriffic and Tweetbot stopped working, it wasn’t by accident. In one fell swoop, third-party apps for Twitter went offline earlier this month, rendering the efforts of many developers futile over the years and shattering their loyalty to the company.
It’s another line in the story of Elon Musk who has owned the social platform since late 2022, where a number of decisions have been heavily criticized or reversed, apparently depending on how he felt that day.
This decision could be one of the worst though, as it quickly destroyed any goodwill developers had for the platform, and all the company has done to acknowledge this is a tweet that is unnecessarily mysterious that you can’t help but think that it comes from a soap opera.
Out of frustration comes innovation
Twitter maintains its longstanding API rules. That may cause some apps to not work.January 17, 2023
Shown above is the tweet that raised even more questions than the goal of acknowledging that these third-party apps have limited access to Twitter.
For transparency you would normally expect a web link to a support page, with the rules and why it came to this conclusion – but there is nothing. It’s a slap in the face to developers who’ve worked tirelessly on their own Twitter apps to let users choose how they want to read their feed and compose their tweets, but now they’re forced to use an official app that’s become more unstable ever since Musk cut the platform’s workforce, making teams nonexistent, such as the press team.
Again, we have to scratch their heads and wonder if we’ll see another tweet in the near future to either reverse the decision or explain it in more cryptic tweets, like a 2008-era Facebook status with a large ‘I’ll inbox’. your hun’ vibes.
It’s a real shame to see one of Twitter’s greatest assets, both in goodwill and innovation from outside the company, go up in flames all at once. It’s not the way to do things by any means. From the playground to a meeting at the office, you just don’t do that.
However, this also boosts the alternatives, such as Mastodon and even Instagram. Icon Factory, responsible for Tweetbot, is now turning its attention to a client called Mastodon ivory (opens in new tab). It already looks great and hopefully the platform will appeal to more users over time.
This is the only positive you can get out of all this – but it shouldn’t have ended that way.