End of service for Tweetbot, Twitterrific, Echofon and other Fenix: third-party apps for Twitter are banned from the social network, prevented from functioning. From now on, only the official app gives access to Elon Musk’s social network.

End of service for Tweetbot, Twitterrific, Echofon and other Fenix: third-party apps for Twitter are banned from the social network, prevented from functioning. From now on, only the official app gives access to Elon Musk’s social network.

This is news that will further degrade Twitter, which has been extremely criticized since its eventful takeover by Elon Musk! It’s now official: the social network with the blue bird prohibits third-party applications that allow access to its platform via a special API, without going through the official app. Tweetbot, Twitterrific, Echofon, Fenix ​​or Talon and many other popular tools of the same type simply no longer work in this month of January 2023, now banned from access to Twitter, and thus losing all their interest. However, Twitter has allowed their existence and use for years, to the delight of users who could choose the interface they preferred – with sometimes more successful results than the official application.

Twitter: the mysterious end of third-party applications

Since January 13, 2023, Twitter’s various third-party apps have mysteriously stopped working. Blame it on a technical failure, a bug or a change in policy? The mystery remained intact. The blue bird finally cracked a tweet that was vague to say the least: “Twitter enforces its longstanding API policies. This may result in some apps not working”. They therefore no longer have access to the programming interface allowing them to develop their own client for the platform. A strange change to say the least, given that some of them have been around for many years – Tweetbot is no less than ten years old – and there had never been any particular problem. Twitter has finally updated its development agreement, and more precisely the “Restrictions” part. From now on, it is forbidden to use the API for “create a service or product that is similar to or substitutes for Twitter applications”. In short, it’s the end of third-party applications.

Of course, their developers are extremely disappointed, especially since they received no advance warning or any communication or information. “Today marks the end of an era. Unfortunately, we have been forced to remove Twitterrific from the iOS and Mac App Stores. Twitter’s unexplained revocation of our API access has left the app with no future”, laments Twitterrific. On his side, Talon laments : “Twitter has clarified its position. […] Alas, this ultimately means Talon will stop working.”. It is all the more regrettable that the social network has been able to gain popularity thanks to this type of application. Twitterrific, for example, launched on iOS before the official app arrived on the App Store.

One can legitimately ask: why such a decision? The most likely theory is that this is an effort to centralize all Internet users on a single application which, unlike third-party applications, displays advertising – the blue bird does not generate revenue if there is no advertisement. The social network is so heavily in debt that its new boss is doing everything to reduce costs as much as possible, whether with mass layoffs, charging for usernames or selling his furniture on the Internet. We can also see it as a way to reassure advertisers as best they can. All that remains for the moment is TweetDeck, an alternative client that is developed internally at Twitter. But given the drastic reductions in the workforce, not sure he will make it through the winter…