Twitter Officially Bans Third-party Clients

According to The Verge, Twitter has officially banned third-party clients with its newly updated developer rules.

The site is reporting that:

“The rules, updated on Thursday, make it clear what that means: “Twitter Applications” refers to the company’s “consumer facing products, services, applications, websites, web pages, platforms, and other offerings, including without limitation, those offered via https://twitter.com and Twitter’s mobile applications.” The clause banning alternative services was added to the rules with the most recent update, according to the Wayback Machine.

The rule change comes after Twitter silently broke several popular third-party Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Twitterific starting on January 12th. At the time, the developers behind the apps (many of which have historically shaped the entire Twitter user experience) said they had received no communication whatsoever from the company about what was happening. Then, on January 17th, the company’s developer account tweeted that it was “enforcing its long-standing API rules,” which “may result in some apps not working.””

What does this mean for future app developers on Twitter? Only time will tell, but as Elon Musk has stated, there will be some mistakes made by the company after he took over as they look to improve the app overall.