Twitter became inaccessible via third-party apps last week. Now, it appears that Elon Musk’s microblogging site has deliberately banned popular third-party Twitter clients, including Tweetbot. Twitter’s move to ban third-party apps was intentional, according to a report, and users can now only access the platform through the official Twitter app. In addition, Tweetbot co-creator Paul Haddad also confirmed that the suspension appears to be intentional. Tweetbot worked again for a few hours on Sunday after using a workaround, but soon became inaccessible to users on iOS. According to Haddad, this was evidence that Twitter was intentionally removing access for third-party customers.
The information reports that the block, which has been affecting users of third-party Twitter apps since last week, is intentional. The report quotes twitters internal Slack communication reportedly confirming the decision. Neither Twitter nor its CEO Elon Musk however, have given a reason for the suspension.
Haddad, in a mastodon post Officealso said that before the suspension, Tweetbot “didn’t even get a whiff of communication” from Twitter, while confirming that the third-party app was down again. “And now dead again, along with some old unused API keys, proving that this was intentional and we and others were specifically targeted,” he wrote.
Haddad elaborated on this in a separate article post Office that he had received no official or unofficial communication from anyone at Twitter, even after the app shut down, came back briefly, and shut down again. “Even without these leaks, if you add up the lack of communication affecting only the top 25-50 Twitter API clients and clients showing blocked in development. Dashboard,” he wrote. “The only conclusion at this point is that it was intentional and not a bug.”
Tweetbot briefly appeared to be working again when they exchanged their API keys, and a Gadgets360 employee was able to log into the service earlier Monday before becoming inaccessible again. An API is a software interface that enables communication between two or more programs. All third-party Twitter clients use the Twitter API to access the service.
After tweets by an iOS developer duo known as “Mysk” (@mysk_co) on Twitter, Tweetbot started working with some limitations after using new API credentials for the app. However, users could only share 300 posts per 15 minutes. “The Twitter API is not broken,” the developers said. While Tweetbot’s return was short-lived, popular third-party client Twitterrific remains banned.
This is proof of that #twitter deliberately suspended @tweetbot. The developers just created a new Twitter API app and received new credentials. The app works, albeit with limitations. The Twitter API is not broken. When a platform pushes developers to resort to such workarounds, it is doomed to failure https://t.co/Ra4CtJo40I
— Mysk 🇨🇦🇩🇪 (@mysk_co) January 15, 2023
On Friday, users began reporting that they were unable to access their accounts in third-party apps such as Twitterrific, Tweetbot and Fenix on Android and iOS through the microblogging site. Gadgets360 was able to do this confirm that Twitterific and Tweetbot on iOS and Fenix on Android could not access Twitter.
