Twitter officially takes a stand on third-party apps, banning them from its platform. The company has added a new clause in its developer agreement that prohibits the creation of a product that is similar to the official Twitter appr. With this change, it effectively blocked any alternative clients, created by third-party developers.
Twitter officially blocks third-party apps
This news does not come out of nowhere, indeed those who use third-party applications have already been dealing with it for a week. Indeed, third-party Twitter clients suddenly stopped working last week, leaving confused many users and developers.
Twitter initially kept silent, then tweeted yesterday. The company announced it was “applying its long-standing API rulesta” and that this “may cause some apps not to work”. But it seems instead, as the developers report on XDA-Developers, that thehe policy update only arrived on yesterday’s American morning.
The rule now reads: “You will not use or attempt to (and you will not allow others to) use or access the Licensed Materials to create or attempt to create a service or a substitute or similar product to the Twitter Applications“.
With this change, developers are no longer allowed to create Twitter clients. As you might expect, this change impacts many developers who have built great clients over the years, some of them they are extremely popular (Twitter alternative apps make the list of the best applications of many American publications every year, where social media is much more used).
In addition to the detriment for developers and users using alternative clients, there is the fact that the announcement came so quickly and with a sudden change in policy – pretending it had always been like this.
The fact is that, in order to have guaranteed support, users will have to download the official Twitter app. Or change social networks directly.