Ben Schoon: Twitter Officially Bans Third-Party Clients in New Developer Agreement

This comes a week after Twitter clients unexpectedly shut down across Android, iOS, and other platforms without notice. Twitter and its new owner, Elon Musk, were silent on the issue for several days until reports came out to show that the company had intentionally cut off third-party Twitter clients. After that, Twitter finally confirmed the cutoff, saying that it was “enforcing long-standing API rules” without clarifying which rules were being broken.

Here's the timeline for posterity:

1. Most popular third party Twitter apps stop working
2. Twitter says nothing for days
3. Twitter tweets that devs breaking "long standing" rules have been banned (rules are not mentioned)
4. No one can find the rules being broken
5. Twitter updates their rules to ban third party apps

As the saying goes, the cruelty is the point.

Twitter could have very easily updated their terms, given developers of these apps 30 day's warning, and disabled them after those 30 days. the fact they did it out of the blue and without communication is just being a dick.