Twitter kills third-party apps, Instagram adds Quiet Mode, Google’s antitrust trial gets a date • TechCrunch

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app economy in 2023

hit a few snags, as consumer spending last year dropped for the first time by 2% to $167 billion, according to the latest “State of Mobile” report by data.ai (previously App

Annie). However, downloads are continuing to grow, up 11% year-over-year in 2022 to reach 255 billion. Consumers are also spending more time using mobile apps than ever before. On

Android devices alone, hours spent in 2022 grew 9%, reaching 4.1 trillion. This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place with the latest

from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and much more. Do you want This Week in Apps in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up

here: techcrunch.com/newsletters The end of the Twitter app era It’s incredible how third-party Twitter clients had been able to survive Twitter’s ups and downs over the years,

including its various API changes and constantly fluctuating business objectives and policies, only to be unceremoniously killed in 2023 by the whims of a billionaire. This week,

in what has been one of the more depressing moments in tech history, longtime Twitter apps like IconFactory’s Twitterific, Tapbot’s Tweetbot and others like Birdie, Fenix,

Echofon and many more were unceremoniously cut off from being able to access Twitter’s API and serve their customer base. Instead of warning developers that Twitter’s policies

were changing and giving them time to wind down their operations and communicate with their longtime users and subscribers, Twitter quietly, callously and deliberately revoked

their API access. They “fixed the glitch,” so to speak. Users and developers found out about the change as the apps stopped working, but not because of any official

communication from Twitter itself. As backlash and outrage grew, Twitter then made matters worse by trying to gaslight its community about the situation. The company tweeted it was

only enforcing its “long-standing” rules, then rushed to update its documentation to reflect what those rules actually were. Of course, there was a time when Twitter tried to

shut down the Twitter app ecosystem: you know, 12 years ago. Following its acquisition of Tweetie, which became Twitter’s own native app, the company in 2011 told developers they

should stop trying to compete with Twitter on clients and instead focus on other API use cases, like data and verticals. It was the sort of classic, misguided move Twitter always