Twitter officially bans third-party clients

It has been a tough ride so far since Elon Musk took over at Twitter, the lovely microblog-service for many, many years. Having seemingly the task not to only cut costs for all sake but ruining every user experience simultaneously, this story’s next chapter now reads that famous third-party clients are finally banned.

Users of better and cleaner apps like Tweetbot, Twitterific or Fenix now only have the chance to drop their favorite app and exchange it with Twitter’s official or lose the mobile experience at all.

This is sad, this is yet another joke and an unbelievable fist in the face of all developers who invested their energy, passion and free time over the years to build a better Twitter-experience for the user. Although changing APIs is of course one of Twitter’s householder’s rights, the time and the kind of how this was communicated (well, it wasn’t until everyone knew what was happening) is what Twitter has turned into with Mr. Musk steering the big blue ship.

While Twitter must, of course, earn money, the only way to push ads to the users or work with an own algorithm is the official Twitter-app while many third-party apps were devoted to bringing a different experience to mobile users: With clean timelines and less to zero ads. Like the folks at Engadget posted the developers haven’t heard anything from Twitter when the API stopped working and users encountered errors within the apps. The results: Famous and well-deserved app have been pulled from the different app stores and will cease to exist.

Twitterrific-developer Sean Heber for example confirmed that the 16-year-old app has been discontinued.

“We are sorry to say that the app’s sudden and undignified demise is due to an unannounced and undocumented policy change by an increasingly capricious Twitter — a Twitter that we no longer recognize as trustworthy nor want to work with any longer.”

Heber wrote in an update.

Tweetbot-developers Tapbots have also pulled back their famous app from Apple’s App Store and will concentrate on their new Mastodon-app entitled “Ivory” which is in an early access-stage at the time of writing, preventing that love and passion for a developer that accompanied users for over a decade will get lost. Although there is still a lot of work to do here, there is a glimmer of hope that Tapbots will once again perform in an habituated manner on Apple’s mobile platform.

Yet another foul play from Twitter under the new “government”.