Twitter bans third-party clients in developer term update

Twitter updated its developer rules to ban third-party clients on Thursday following the recent blocking of several apps’ access to the platform this week. Some of the apps, such

as Tweetbot, which provides a subscriber-only ad-free Twitter experience, would compete with the platform’s subscription service, Twitter Blue. This week several major

third-party Twitter applications lost access to the platform. On January 14, The Information reported that the outage was an internal decision by Twitter. In a statement,

Twitterriffic, another third-party app that provided an ad-free Twitter experience for $9.99 per year, said the app has been discontinued by a Twitter that “we no longer

recognize as trustworthy nor want to work with any longer.” Twitterriffic encouraged its customers who subscribed through iOS to consider not requesting a refund from Apple.

“The loss of ongoing, recurring revenue from Twitterrific is already going to hurt our business significantly, and any refunds will come directly out of our pockets,”

Twitteriffic stated. Several third-party clients charge Twitter users for various services that range from scheduling a tweet to accessing the platform without using the Twitter

app or website. When Tapbots launched the newest version of Tweetbot in 2021, it introduced a subscription-based payment requirement. This required users to pay either $0.99 per

month or $5.99 per year. Tweetbot is but one example of the many third-party applications that are now no longer able to access the platform. An update to Twitter’s developer

rules on Thursday explained why Twitter banned third party-apps from accessing the platform. The update followed the company’s tweet from its Twitter Developer account that said

it was enforcing its long-standing API rules, which would result in some apps not working. Twitter is enforcing its long-standing API rules. That may result in some apps not

working. — Twitter Dev (@TwitterDev) January 17, 2023 According to Twitter’s Developer Agreement, the platform defined the term Twitter Applications as its “consumer facing

products, services, applications, websites, web pages, platforms, and other offerings, including without limitation, those offered via Twitter.com and Twitter’s mobile

applications.”  Twitter’s Restrictions on Use of Licensed Materials further elaborates that developers will not “use or access the Licensed Materials to create or attempt to

create a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Application.” This completely eliminates third-party apps, especially those competing with Twitter Blue. In