Twitter has finally confirmed what pretty much everyone already knew – that it was behind the outage of popular third-party Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Twitterific.
In a message posted to its Twitter Dev account for developers, the company said, “Twitter is enforcing its longstanding API rules. It may cause some apps not to work.” However, it declined to provide details of which API rules the third-party app developers violated.
In response to the tweet, Tapbots, developer of Tweetbot, said that his app “has been around for over 10 years, we’ve always adhered to the Twitter API rules. If there is an existing rule that we must comply with, we are happy to do so where possible. But we need to know what it is… @TwitterDev you know how to reach us.”
Tweetbot, Twitterific, and other similar apps suddenly stopped working last week, forcing users to either switch to the default Twitter app, to Twitter’s own TweetDeck dashboard, or simply to stop using the social media platform.
As of Tuesday, Twitter had said nothing about the outage, leading some to believe a bug could be to blame. But as the problem persisted, suspicions grew that the ban had been initiated by Twitter headquarters, possibly at the direction of the company’s new owner, Elon Musk.
This was confirmed by Pretty Accurate on Saturday The informationwhich reported that it had recently seen internal messages on Twitter, including one from a senior software engineer describing the outage as “premeditated”.
The view seems to be that Musk is dissatisfied with the third-party Twitter apps as they don’t show Twitter ads, a situation hampering the company’s ability to grow its revenue — an ambition the new owner has in mind centered.
But Twitter’s obscurity is frustrating not only for the many people who have enjoyed using these apps for years, but also for the developers, who have invested a great deal of time and effort in refining the software, with no objection from Twitter up until now.
It’s not clear what the developers can do to gain acceptance again, as Twitter hasn’t offered any details about the nature of the apparent API breach, at least publicly.
Last month, Musk said “Transparency is the key to trust.” Many are now hoping for that from him, so that this current problem can be properly solved.
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