Since Thursday evening, Third-party Twitter apps like Tweetbot, Fenix, and Twitterrific have been experiencing a service outage. This made it impossible for users to view and send tweets. As of right now, developers have not heard from Twitter regarding the issue.
Paul Haddad, a co-creator of Tweetbot, said on Saturday that they have not received any updates from Twitter. Tweetbot briefly became available a few days later, but the app broke again after a few hours.
Meanwhile, Twitterrific last Friday stated that they are also clueless about the situation. "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," its blog stated.
Fenix has also acknowledged the issue, stating that they have removed the app from the Google Play Store while they sort out the problem.
There has been no word from the official Twitter and Twitter Support accounts regarding the issue. This has resulted in speculations that this was Twitter"s move to get rid of third-party clients. A recent report by The Information seems to confirm this, because according to internal messages they gained access to, a senior software engineer said “Third-party app suspensions are intentional."
What"s more, the report also stated that one employee asked when they can get a list of "approved talking points" in line with the issue of broken third-party Twitter apps. A reply by a product marketing manager purportedly stated that Twitter has "started to work on comms," but they aren’t sure yet when that information will be ready to be shared with developers.
Not all third-party Twitter apps have stopped functioning, however. In our own testing, Albatross on Android has continued to work as intended. Of course, the app might also become unavailable anytime soon as we wait for any official word from Twitter.
Source: The Information (paywall) via The Verge
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