After remaining silent for days now, Twitter seems to finally be commenting on why many third-party clients, such as Tweetbot and Twitterrific, remain down. However, the company’s answer is leaving no one satisfied.
On Tuesday, the official Twitter Dev account tweeted the brief statement: “Twitter is enforcing its long-standing API rules. That may result in some apps not working.”
Twitter’s application programming interface (API) is designed to allow third-party sites and apps to pull tweets from the service. But the policy for the API does include various restrictions, which can prohibit a third-party client from aggregating location data or pulling too many tweets from the platform, thus circumventing the Twitter-imposed “rate limits.”
Hence, the statement from the Twitter Dev accounts suggests the third-party clients violated Twitter’s API in some way. However, the company refrained from saying which rule was actually broken. Thus, third-party clients have no way to remedy the issue unless Twitter speaks up.
The vagueness caused the co-creator of Tweetbot, Paul Haddad, to respond with his own joke. “I want to publicly apologize to Twitter for breaking its long-standing API rule of _______,” he wrote on his Mastodon account.
Tapbots, the publisher for Tweetbot, added: “Tweetbot has been around for over 10 years, we've always complied with the Twitter API rules. If there's some existing rule that we need to comply with, we'd be happy to do so, if possible. But we do need to know what it is…”
Meanwhile, Twitterrific said on Friday that nothing had been communicated to them either about breaking any rules. “There’s been no official word from Twitter about what’s going on, but that’s unsurprising since the new owner (Elon Musk) eliminated the employees dedicated to keeping the API up and running smoothly, including the developer evangelists who previously provided communication with third-parties,” Twitterrific’s publisher IconFactory wrote in a blog post.
Users have been speculating Twitter cut access to the API because the third-party clients don’t bring any ad revenue to the company at a time when Musk has warned Twitter is facing a potential bankruptcy. But so far, Musk himself has remained mum on the matter.
In the meantime, Haddad has said Tweetbot may need to be removed if it can no longer access Twitter’s API.