Twitter acknowledges deliberately closing third-party apps from API

Twitter confirms on its own platform that there is a deliberate action when it appeared a few days ago that third-party apps that use Twitter’s API were closed. The company provides no further explanation.

Twitter says only that it “enforces the long standing API rules” and that that might mean some apps will stop working. This makes it clear that third-party apps such as Twitterific and Tweetbot are being deliberately blocked.

The social media company does not provide any further explanation. There is also no reference to the specific rules on the basis of which Twitter took this step. Partly because of this, it is also unclear why, for example, certain smaller third-party apps still function.

Twitter’s confirmation follows reports from developers of Twitter apps that have been running into problems since last Friday. They indicated that they were experiencing problems with logging in and were already pointed to Twitter’s API. Many of the better known apps are offline.

The Information recently pointed to internal Twitter communication that the medium has seen. It emerged that there was no question of a malfunction, but that access to the API was closed. A developer of Tweetbot suggested although it was a deliberate action, because changing the api keys led to the app functioning briefly again.

Twitter once gave broad and free access to the API, but that situation came to an end more than ten years ago. The company earns less or no money from users of third-party clients, partly because some apps do not display advertisements.