Twitter, the blogging giant has taken up an unusual decision to kill all the third-party app features and non-operational developer tools. Other popular features include automatic timeline updates and push notifications.
The director of Twitter, Rob Johnson said, “They would stop supporting API’s that feature third-party applications so that the developers can concentrate on its own applications.” It will also stop reflecting its features on Apple Watch, Mac phones, and Windows phone.
Twitter said in a blog post, “The best we can give to our users is through our own platforms such as Android and iOS for mobiles devices as well as for desktops.” The company thinks of introducing innovative features of Twitter in its local products such as pull-to-refresh gesture, mute and lot more.
The company will provide an alternative for its free streaming server connection developers called as Account Activity API that will cost a monthly subscription of $2,899 for a group of 250 users.
Following are some of the third-party app features that Twitter has already removed:
- Stats tab and activity tab has been removed.
- Push notifications for Quotes, Retweets, Likes, and Follows has been deactivated. Twitter will introduce some of the alternatives for these options.
- Timeline streaming on Wi-Fi is disabled. They will be automatically refreshed after 1-2 minutes.
- Push notifications for Direct Mentions and Mentions will be delayed by a few minutes.
Twitter first mentioned the third-party applications in April and decided to shut down in June. But, it delayed the closing as it received many requests from users that they require some more time to update their apps.
Johnson said they are cutting down the support for developer tools so that they can whole and sole focus on providing the best in-house apps and services to their clients. Most of them did not like Twitter’s this decision. Hence, they decided to retain back TweetDeck, the web client for desktops for professionals who are interested in using more advanced tools.
Currently, TweetDeck works only for desktop users. Years ago it has killed the same service for Windows, Android, and iOS smartphones. Majority of changes that Twitter makes in its applications comes from user’s minds and not from the organization. But, the company has to suffer a bit in terms of finance for fulfilling user’s request and meet basic business objectives.
Twitter’s recent announcement about improvement in its platform such as mitigating the effect of troll-like behavior will also come as a part of latest proclamation.
