Social media
Third-party Twitter software loses access to the service
The logo of the social network Twitter on a building of the company’s headquarters in San Francisco. photo
© Jeff Chiu/AP/dpa
Was it with the popular Twitter apps like Tweetbot or Twitterrific? There are currently problems accessing the Twitter service – intentional or just a technical problem?
Numerous Twitter apps such as Tweetbot, with which users could access the online service, suddenly stopped working. The software has not been able to connect to the Twitter interfaces since Friday.
Customers of the apps must use it to access the official Twitter app or the web version. At the weekend, Twitter initially gave no official information about what happened.
The Silicon Valley website “The Information” reported, citing internal Twitter chats, that access had been intentionally cut off. However, the reasons for this could not be found out.
Twitter makes its money with advertising: In the company’s own app and the web version, users are presented with paid contributions between the tweets they have subscribed to. There are no ads in the third-party apps that have been with Twitter practically from the start. Thus, Twitter earns nothing when users access the service there.
New Twitter owner Elon Musk has emphasized his focus on making money since advertising revenues plummeted after his takeover. Musk, who had promised more transparency, has not yet commented on the situation surrounding other providers’ Twitter apps.
The developers of the apps Tweetbot and Twitterrific wrote to their users that they were not getting any answers to their queries from Twitter. The apps are affected differently: Tweetbot, for example, does not work on all devices, while Twitterrific no longer runs on the iPhone, but still runs on Apple’s Mac computers. The Fenix app works on iPhones, but no longer on Android smartphones.