Twitter shuts down legacy API that enabled push notifications on custom clients

Twitter has shut down a legacy API that third-party Twitter clients used to enable push notifications and automatic feed refreshes. Clients such as Talon, Tweetbot, Tweetings and Twitterific lose functionality as a result and have no viable alternative.

Twitter made earlier this year announced that this legacy API would be retired on August 16, 2018. In that blog post, the company cites that developers who are still using the API have three months to switch to the new API. However, according to a website that several Twitter app developers have set up, it is simply too expensive for them to switch to the new api; as an example, they’re talking about $2,899 monthly charges to serve 250 users, which would mean they’d have to charge $16 a month to users to break even.

The most popular Twitter clients that are losing functionality according to analyst firm Sensor Tower include Twitterific, Echofon, TweetCaster, Tweetbot and Ubersocial. These clients have been downloaded a total of six million times in the past four and a half years. That writes TechCrunch. In the past year alone, 500,000 of those installations are said to have taken place. In an internal email, also in the hands of TechCrunch, Twitter said it would affect 1 percent of third-party developers who work with Twitter. The amount of users would also amount to around 1 percent.

While the percentage “damage” is limited, Twitter owes several parts of its social medium to implementations that started with these third-party clients; the Twitter logo originated with Twitteriffic, as did the word ‘tweet’, and the concept of ‘pull-to-refresh’ comes from Tweetie.