Well, I hope you don’t want to use just about any major third-party clients on Twitter, because Elon Musk appears to have blocked them from accessing Twitter’s API for some reason. According to internal Slack messages viewed by The Information, the social media platform intentionally suspended those third-party apps. In one post, a senior software engineer literally says: “Third-party app suspensions are intentional.”
The third-party Twitter clients have been broken since at least Thursday evening, and developers say they still don’t have any kind of update, according to the Verge. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mashable.
Since Thursday evening, users have been complaining that they couldn’t use Tweetbot, Twitterrific, and other apps you can use to scroll through Twitter without going directly through Twitter’s software.
“And I really want an official public statement,” Tweetbot co-creator Paul Haddad said in a Mastodon post on Sunday. “We have a large number of sub. renewals for year 3 of Tweetbot coming up in a couple of weeks. If we’re permanently cut off I need to know so we can remove the app from sale and prevent those. Which obviously I’d rather not do.”
On Sunday Twitterrific tweeted: “There’s still no official word about what’s going on. We apologize for the ongoing interruption.”
But, as with anything Musk is doing at Twitter, it isn’t particularly thorough. Some apps — like Albatross and Fenix — still work for some people while others don’t, depending on if you’re using it on iOS or Android, the Verge reported. It’s all, unsurprisingly, messy.
