Elon Musk’s “extremely hardcore”version of Twitter abruptly and unexpectedly disabled API access for popular third-party Twitter clients back in January, citing unnamed “long-standing API rules”that the apps appeared to be violating. The company later revised its agreement with the developer to ban “a replacement or similar service or product for the Twitter apps”.
For the former developers of Tweetbot and Twitterific, two of Twitter’s longest-lived and most popular third-party clients, this meant losing their biggest product and revenue streams, and refunding subscribers who were suddenly unable to use the apps they paid for.
Tapbots and The Iconfactory (developers of Tweetbot and Twitterrific, respectively) have released the latest update to their Twitter apps, helping users deal with expired subscriptions. If users wish to receive a prorated refund (dated January 12, the last day both clients worked normally), they do not need to take any action; both apps will give prorated refunds to subscribers they don’t hear from. But the apps also have a button that allows users to opt out of refunds, allowing developers to save that money to fund future projects.
“Losing ongoing, recurring revenue from Twitterrific will already hurt our business significantly and any refunds will come directly out of our pockets and not from Twitter or Apple,” Twitter’s Sean Heber wrote on his blog shortly after accessing The API has been closed. discontinued. “To put it simply, thousands of refunds would be devastating for a small company like ours.”
Users who declined refunds for Tweetbot or Twitterrific can contact Apple and request a refund later if they change their mind. If you are a Tweetbot or Twitterific subscriber and have already uninstalled the app, you can redownload it to reschedule your subscription or opt out of a refund.
Tapbots has already moved on to a new project called Ivory, an iOS and iPadOS client for the Mastodon decentralized social network that looks and works much like Tweetbot used to (the macOS client is still in development). Tweetbot users can choose to transfer their remaining Tweetbot subscriptions to Ivory instead of receiving or refusing a refund. Iconfactory has expressed interest in supporting Mastodon and its underlying ActivityPub protocol, but has not developed any specific products as of late January.
Accessing the Twitter API is one of many topics that the wobbly version of Musk-era Twitter has struggled to solve. Musk initially announced that anyone who wants to use the API will have to pay for it, including researchers and automated bot accounts. He later said that “a lightweight write-only API”would be available “for bots that provide good free content”. This post is dated Feb 4th and no official API access announcements have been made since then.
“It seems like Twitter’s API access plan has been forgotten,” Tapbots co-founder Paul Haddad wrote on Mastodon. “I’m guessing they didn’t have anyone to properly implement any of the paid rate limits in API 1.1 and they just dropped the whole thing.”