Reminder: Third Party Twitter Apps Have Been Hamstrung

Earlier this year Twitter announced a set of API changes that would negatively affect third party Twitter apps. Those changes go into effect today, and apps like Tweetbot have already begun making changes.

[How to Stop Twitter from Collecting and Sharing Personal Data for Advertisers]

Tweetbot

Tweetbot was updated yesterday to comply with the new rules. Timeline streaming over Wi-Fi has been disabled. This means that your Twitter timeline will refresh every one to two minutes, instead of as new tweets come in.

On August 16th Twitter will disable parts of their public interface that we use in Tweetbot. Because Twitter has chosen not to provide alternatives to these interfaces we have been forced to disable or degrade certain features. We’re sorry about this, but unfortunately this is totally out of our control.

Push notifications for Mentions and Direct Messages have also been delayed for a few minutes. Push notifications for likes, retweets, follows, and quotes and been disabled entirely. The Activity and Stats sections have been removed, and Tweetbot was forced to kill its Apple Watch app.

Twitter has always had a rough relationship with developers and third party Twitter apps. In my opinion this might be an advertising concern. Many—if not all—third party Twitter apps remove Twitter’s ads.

[What Features Would Break After the Proposed Twitter API Change? (Update)]

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