INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Twitter is giving developers more time to adjust to its API platform overhaul, which has affected some apps‘ ability to continue operating
The company clarified this morning, along with news of the general availability of its Account Activity API, that it will be delaying the
shutdown of some of its legacy APIs by three months& time
That is, APIs originally slated for a June 19, 2018 shutdown & including Site Streams, User Streams, and legacy Direct Message Endpoints &
will now be deprecated on Wednesday, August 16, 2018.
The news follows an announcement from Favstarthat said it will end its business when
the older APIs are shut down for good
And it follows the relaunched Mac app from Tweetbot,which includes a list of changes as to how the app will work when the API changes go
into effect.
Twitter had said back in April that it would delay the scheduled June 19th deprecation date, but didn&t announce a new date at
That may have led some developers to believe that a longer reprieve was in order while Twitter rethought its plans.
Today, Twitter says that
not the case & it only a three-month delay.
With the public launch of the Account Activity API, developers can transition to the new API
platform.
Plus, the beta that only offered Direct Messages is being shut down on August 16th, 2018, Twitter says
(Migration details on that arehere.)
Twitter is also reducing the number of subscriptions from the 35 accounts allowed during the beta to
15 free subscriptions for its Premium Sandbox of the API & the free tier meant as way for developers to experiment
The paid Premium tier offers up to 250 accounts, and Enterprise pricing is available, too
(See chart below).
But developers will have to reach out to Twitter directly to receive enterprise pricing details.
In addition, Twitter
makes it clear that any apps that rely on the older Site Streams and User Streams APIs, will have to live without that functionality after
It claims this won&t affect most apps & only a small percentage.
&As a few developers have noticed, there no streaming connection capability
or home timeline data, which are only used by a small amount of developers (roughly 1% of monthly active apps),& writes Twitter Senior
Product Manager, Kyle Weiss, in a blog post
&As we retire aging APIs, we have no plans to add these capabilities to Account Activity API or create a new streaming service for related
use cases.&
Boom.
Well, at least the announcement addressesdevelopers& complaints about a lack of information from Twitter regarding the
pricing of the new APIs, and how long before all the changes kick in, given the news of a delay.
As Favstar creator Tim Haines explained
when announcing the app shutdown, the lack of information made running its business too difficult.
&&Twitter… [has] not been forthcoming
with the details or pricing.Favstar can&t continue to operate in this environment of uncertainty,& he told TechCrunch earlier this week.
As
for those 1 percent of apps that use the soon-to-be-depracated APIs & like Talon, Tweetbot, Tweetings or Twitterific & the plan was to
switch over to the Enterprise Account Activity API
But they were frustrated that Twitter wasn&t saying how much it would cost; so they didn&t know if it would be an affordable option to
It looks like they&ll now get those details.
But as those developers pointed out recently, there were broader concerns that the API changes
were meant to actively discourage &client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream consumer client experience,& as Twitter had once said
Unfortunately for end users, the company decision is especially frustrating, given that Twitter shut down its native Mac app.
It does appear
that Twitter is looking to impact the functionality of these &1 percent& of apps, given that it will no longer let them stream in tweets as
they&re posted (it making the statuses/home_timeline endpoint available instead & which is not streaming)
And other notifications will be delayed by a couple of minutes, in some cases, as Tweetbot creator, Paul Haddad, explained yesterday.
Along
with the news today, Twitter shared links to resources to help developers migrate to new APIs and learn more & including thedeveloper
portal, amigration guide, aresources page that outlines these changes, and Twitter&scommunity forums.
