Last night at about 7:30pm PST, Twitterrific customers started reporting problems accessing Twitter via the iOS app.
News quickly spread on Twitter and Mastodon that a wide range of third party apps like Twitterrific, Tweetbot, Echofon, and many others had been disabled. Strangely, Twitterrific for macOS continues to work normally. We cannot say for certain why some clients are unaffected, but it seems possible that there is a new (seemingly unstated and unannounced) policy that is only being applied to apps with large numbers of users.
There’s been no official word from Twitter about what’s going on, but that’s unsurprising since the new owner eliminated the employees dedicated to keeping the API up and running smoothly, including the developer evangelists who previously provided communication with third-parties.
We wouldn’t know whom to reach out to at Twitter even if such people existed. We’re in the dark just as much as you are, sadly.
As soon as we have a better understanding of what has happened, we’ll update this blog post and let you know. In the meantime, if you own a Mac you can use Twitterrific for macOS (but we don’t know how much longer this will last).
You can also follow @iconfactory on Twitter or find several of us on Mastodon: Ged, Sean, Craig, Talos and Anthony
We’d also like to say thank you to all the people who have reached out to us on Twitter and told us how much they appreciate Twitterrific and our dedication to making Twitter usable over the years. These kind words mean a great deal to every one of us here at the Iconfactory. Quite honestly we wouldn’t be where we are today without your support of our apps like Twitterrific.
Stay tuned and beaks up!
Updated January 17th, 2023: We still have not received any clear communication as to why Twitter deactivated Twitterrific on January 13th. We have been respectful of their API rules, as published, for the past 16 years. We have no knowledge that these rules have changed recently or what those changes might be.
