I've had two weeks to sit with Twitter's API changes and I'm still annoyed, so I figure that's worth a post instead of just grumbling about it to whoever's next to me on the couch.
Quick recap in case you missed it in the Apple/Samsung noise (more on that in a second, maybe, if I can avoid just repeating what every other blog already said this month): back on the 16th Twitter published new rules for developers using their API. The headline stuff is token caps, apps that already have over 100,000 users get to keep growing a little, but anything under that gets capped at roughly double its current user count and that's it, forever, unless Twitter decides otherwise. On top of that there's a whole page of "display requirements" about how tweets have to look in third-party apps now, down to stuff like you must show a Twitter logo, you must make @names clickable, you can't relabel retweets or favorites. Michael Sippey's post about it used the phrase "consistent Twitter experience" so many times I started reading it in a monotone.
Here's my actual problem with it, and it's not really about the rules on paper, it's about what everyone can see coming. Twitter spent years telling developers "build on us, we're a platform," and a bunch of genuinely good software got made because of that. Tweetbot is the app I use every single day on my phone, and I paid actual money for it, $2.99 on iPhone and then another few bucks for the iPad version because apparently thats just how it works now. Twitterrific's been around since basically the beginning, older than the official Twitter app even exists in its current form. These arent scrappy side projects, theyre the reason a lot of us stuck around on the service in the first place instead of drifting off to whatever else was around in 2008 and 2009.
Now the ceiling's basically been lowered on all of them at once, and everyone in the readup-heavy tech corner of the internet is doing the math on when Tweetbot hits its user cap and has to start turning people away or charging a subscription or something worse. I dont think Twitter is trying to kill Tweetbot specifically. I think Twitter wants everyone on twitter.com and the official apps because thats where the ads live, and third-party clients that dont show ads are just friction on the way to that goal. Which, fine, its their service, they can do what they want with it. Doesnt mean I have to like watching a tool I use every day get squeezed from the side without anyone officially saying "we are doing this on purpose."
The thing that gets me is how quiet the actual reasoning is. Nobody at Twitter is going to come out and say "we want fewer independent clients." Instead you get a blog post full of phrases like "the great logged-out reading experience" and a chart with quadrants sorting apps into things Twitter is fine with (analytics tools, business dashboards) and things it very much is not fine with (anything that looks like a general-purpose Twitter client, which is, you know, Tweetbot). Its a corporate way of saying the thing without saying it, and Ive read that chart probably four times now trying to figure out if Im misreading it. I dont think I am.
Selfishly, I dont want to go back to using twitter.com in a browser tab or whatever the built-in iOS app is doing these days. Tweetbot's swipe-to-reply gesture alone is worth more to me than most apps I own. If it becomes a subscription to keep using, Im honestly fine paying for that too, Ive already shown Im willing to pay for the app once. What I dont love is the feeling that a company can change the deal on independent developers with two weeks notice and a blog post, after those developers spent actual years building things on top of it.
Anyway. Apple and Samsung is still the bigger story of the month by a mile and I dont have much to add there that a hundred other sites havent already said better. This felt like the smaller thing worth actually writing down before I forget I was annoyed about it.