Starting tomorrow, Twitter will begin to turn off, or deprecate, two important API’s that third party apps use to interact with their service. Twitter will start slowly phasing these features out on Thursday, August 16th, and completely shut them off by August 23rd. We’ve spoken about these changes at great length in the past but wanted to remind Twitterrific users about what is happening.
To summarize, here’s what Twitter’s changes mean for you:
- Live streaming of tweets is ending
- You will no longer receive native push notifications
- Twitterrific’s Today view will no longer update
What Can I Do?
Although Twitterrific will no longer stream tweets in real time, we’ve implemented automatic refresh for both the iOS and macOS apps. This means that if you had previously enabled live streaming in Twitterrific, the app will now instead check for new tweets every two minutes. Unfortunately, this means that tweets and DM’s will be slightly delayed, but hopefully you won’t notice too much of a difference.
Since Twitterrific will no longer connect to Twitter’s push notification stream, we can no longer inform you immediately when someone likes, RT’s, mentions, or sends you a direct message. The app still badges the appropriate icon at the top of the timeline with an unread dot after loading the latest tweets, but if your iOS device is asleep, you won’t get a notification on the home screen.
To work around this problem we suggest you download the official Twitter client for iOS, add any and all Twitter accounts you want to receive push notifications for and enable them. Once you turn them on, be sure to head back to Twitter’s in-app preferences and then customize the types of notifications you want to receive.
NOTE: By default, Twitter enables their “Quality Filter” so you’ll need to turn this off if you want to receive notifications for ALL tweets, not just those Twitter deems important. Once this is done, you’ll be notified of events like you’re used to with Twitterrific (except for Quoted tweets). You can then launch Twitterrific to respond to these notifications as needed.
Since the information displayed by Twitterrific’s Today view was collected using Twitter’s push notification stream, this feature will no longer function. We’d like to work around this limitation and once again provide a view where you can view your most recent activity, but additional future API restrictions may make this impossible. We’ll all have to wait and see.
Moving Forward
If you have additional questions about how Twitter’s API changes affect you as a Twitterrific user, be sure to visit our Knowledge Base to learn more. We’ll be responding to problems and questions on Twitter all week so be sure to follow @Twitterrific for the latest news and information. You can also follow #BreakingMyTwitter on Twitter to see what others are saying.
Finally, we’re committed to continued development of Twitterrific as long as it makes financial sense and is allowed by Twitter. Despite these changes, we hope you’ll continue to use and support us into the future. We’re not going anywhere.
