Is it game over for third party Twitter apps?

Twitter's developer advocate Jon Cipriano announced last December that Twitter will be replacing certain functionalities on June 18th with something known as the "Account Activity API". It will replace "User Streams and Site Streams, along with the legacy Direct Message endpoints", he explained.

What this means for many third party developers is that the streaming services they rely upon to make Twitter work for their app will no longer work. In an open letter to Twitter on website Apps of a Feather, developers representing popular apps Twitterific, Tweetbot, Talon, and Tweetings said: “This means two things for third-party apps: 1) Push notifications will no longer arrive, 2) Timelines won’t refresh automatically. If you use an app like [ours] there is no way for its developer to fix these issues.”

“Many folks don’t realise that their favourite Twitter app is about to break,” they add. So, that’s the score: if you are a user of any of these third-party apps on your iPhone or Android, then it is pretty much a guarantee that you will no longer receive notifications through push messaging from mid-June onwards unless Twitter changes its mind.

[ apps-of-a-feather.com ]