In the official statement issued by Twitter, it asked third-party developers to stop developing clients for Twitter. This was posted on Twitter’s official developer mailing list by Ryan Sarver.
According to the company, Twitter wants more control over its service to provide a consistent user experience between different platforms. This announcement is a major blow to third-party developers. The message is that major third-party developers who make well-established client software and already have audiences will be able to continue supporting their users, but new developers should refrain from building their own client applications.
According to Ryan Sarver, 90% of Twitter users use the official client, while the rest uses Twitter applications developed by third-party developers. He also added that the having different clients is confusing for end users. (Probably he never heard the phrase “the more, the better”)
Ryan Sarver wrote,
We need to move to a less fragmented world, where every user can experience Twitter in a consistent way. This is already happening organically–the number and market share of consumer client apps that are not owned or operated by Twitter has been shrinking. Developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no.
Twitter is making adjustments to the terms of service of its APIs to define stricter requirements for conforming with Twitter’s expectations regarding how the service is presented. The changes to the terms of service that were introduced, prevents third-party developers from displaying data from alternate services alongside data from Twitter’s APIs. The intention is to block developers from presenting their own trending topics or follower recommendations in Twitter client applications. Sarver hints that more significant changes could come in the future, possibly including limits on what words applications use to describe features.
Twitter’s change of policy shows the companies move from leniency to zero tolerance policy causes concerns and woes for third-party developers, and it will remain so for the foreseeable future.
