#tweetbot

Last week, Twitter updated its developer terms to effectively ban any alternative Twitter client application. The company’s change came after many popular apps — including Twitterrific, Tweetbot, Echofone, and Fenix — were suspended by the company’s developer platform team without any notice or explanation. The social media company hadn’t been transparent about its decisions to shun third-party…

Twitterrific, one of the most iconic third-party Twitter clients, said today that it has removed the iOS and Mac apps from the App Store. Iconfactory, the company that made Twitterrific, said in a blog post that under Elon Musk’s management, the social media network has become “a Twitter that we no longer recognize as trustworthy nor want to work with any longer.” The app has had a rich…

In a new tweet posted to the official Twitter Dev profile, which is focused on providing useful information for developers working with the Twitter API, the company said it is “enforcing its long-standing API rules.” As a result, it acknowledges that some apps are “not working.”

The statement doesn’t say what rules are being changed, and why the company didn’t inform Twitter’s third-party client developers in advance about this change.

Today’s statement from Twitter changes nothing for both users and developers, who now have no idea whether this is the end of their apps or not.

What Twitter is doing to developers is simply disrespectful. Twitter was built around third-party clients, and even the official iOS app only exists today because Twitter acquired Tweetie (a third-party Twitter app for iPhone) in 2010. There are many developers today who devote their work to creating great third-party clients for Twitter, and now they might just lose their jobs.

To say that Twitter’s actions are disgraceful is an understatement. Whether or not they comply with Twitter’s API terms of service, the lack of any advanced notice or explanation to developers is unprofessional and an unrecoverable breach of trust between it and its developers and users.

Twitter’s actions also show a total lack of respect for the role that third-party apps have played in the development and success of the service from its earliest days. Twitter was founded in 2006, but it wasn’t until the iPhone launched about a year later that it really took off, thanks to the developers who built the first mobile apps for the service.

The fact that Elon Musk’s Twitter has cut off third-party developers isn’t surprising. Franky, I expected it sooner, but I didn’t expect it to be done with an utter lack of respect for the developers who played such a critical role in the service’s success for more than a decade. The developers of Twitterrific, Tweetbot, and every other app that has lost access to Twitter’s APIs deserved better than a silent flip of the switch late one Thursday night.