Twitter Third-party Apps Error Raising Concerns

Recently, Twitter users using alternative apps and clients have been seeing errors. There is now speculation as to whether this is a glitch related to layoffs and a lack of developers, or whether Twitter is deliberately making life difficult for third parties.

Shortly after Elon Musk took over Twitter, he laid off more than half of all employees, and many later left voluntarily. Since then, there has been speculation about when Twitter will be driven into the ditch, especially technically. Because some commented shortly after the layoffs that Twitter is like a car that doesn’t have a driver: it can drive for a while, but at some point, it will lose its way and crash into a tree or something.

This also seems to be happening in the last few days and weeks, because Twitter has repeatedly had to contend with strange problems (e.g. missing data in the timeline). As a result, many now thought that the recent problems with third-party clients, most notably the popular Tweetbot, were also related.

Cut off from the Twitter API

But that’s apparently not the case, according to The Information, Twitter is deliberately cutting off certain apps from the API. According to screenshots from Twitter’s internal Slack channels, which were passed to the site, employees there write that the “blocking of third-party apps is intentional”.

In a message, a person on the Product Partnerships team wanted to know what the “Third-Party Access Revoked” case could be public about. This is not an official confirmation, but Elon Musk is not interested in classic press work in his company and, for example, dissolved public relations at Tesla many years ago.

However, the internal Slack messages don’t sound like it’s a glitch. One can certainly speculate as to why. However, Twitter certainly wants to force users to use their own client, similar to what Facebook did years ago.