Een tijdje geleden veranderde Twitter hun API, de van tevoren samengestelde richtlijnen waar ontwikkelaars zich aan moeten houden om gebruik te mogen maken van de data die Twitter heeft. Twitter hoopte met de verandering het ontwikkelaars lastiger te maken om een eigen Twitter-app te maken, zodat ze meer gebruikers kunnen binden aan de officiële applicaties. Één van die regels was dat niet-officiële applicaties niet meer dan 100.000 gebruikers mogen hebben. De Windows 8-app Tweetro is na de lancering van Windows 8 razend populair geworden, maar heeft deze grens helaas overschreden.
Gebruikers van Tweetro ontvingen gisteren deze mail van de maker van Tweetro:
Since the official launch of Windows 8, we’ve seen a massive spike in downloads. We are averaging around 3-4K downloads a day and have had well over 200K downloads since Tweetro launched on ‘Release Preview’. Unfortunately, we’ve been victims of our own success as it appears that the app is now being blocked by Twitter due to the new Token limitations.
The app is now completely crippled and users cannot get past the OAuth screen as they are presented with an error ‘Cannot connect to service’. We were under the impression that Twitter wasn’t going to enforce the token limits until March next year (when all 3rd party apps are required to migrate to the new API’s) however this doesn’t seem to be the case.
We have reached out to Twitter for confirmation however we haven’t heard back yet.
The future of Tweetro is uncertain at this stage but it’s likely that it will be pulled from the Windows Store until we can figure out the best way moving forward. At this stage, we are considering to add further polish to Tweetro and re-launch it as an exclusive ‘premium’ paid app. We would have been more than happy to continue distributing Tweetro for free as the exposure we’ve been receiving from it has been fantastic however being limited by twitter to a maximum of 100,000 users would mean we’d have to justify development via financial means.
We hope that there is a way around the token limitations, at least until the official Twitter app is available on Windows 8 however it seems that Twitter is taking a strong stance on this issue.
We’ll aim to have further announcements in the coming days with regards to what people can expect from future iterations of the app.
In the mean time, for those who are enjoying Tweetro we recommend that they refrain from uninstalling the app, removing accounts from within the app or revoking access from Twitter as there is no method accessing OAuth in its current state.
