Twitter despised third-party Twitter apps for a long time, yet, it did not do not anything about them for years. This summer the company is looking to make some changes. Twitter intends to revoke a significant piece of access that developers have to the service and put in a new system that constrains their activities. These changes may not stop third-party Twitter customers, but it will dampen the performance of the app.
These changes are to be effected on the 16th of August and what they will do is to stop new tweets from streaming into an app and also they inhibit and hold up push notifications.
The first change implies that the timeline in Twitter has to be reinvigorated by hand. On mobile, this ought not to be too much of a strain as users only have to pull down the screen to refresh the timeline. The developer that runs the Android Twitter client Talon, Luke Klinker stated that about 3% of his users most of the time leave the auto-refresh feature on, the only problem is that it drains the battery rapidly. Iconfactory’s Craig Hockenberry however commented that it would be an issue when watching an even on television. According to him, “Pulling to refresh in those cases works, but is awkward and feels ‘slow.”
On desktop, Twitter apps also require that you refresh your timeline, but they seldom do so. It therefore will present an issue to the kind of user that wishes to see every tweet as soon as it is made. Also, it is important to note that notifications will be limited on desktop.
Push notifications may present more problems, because it seems like they will probably vanish on mobile or be drastically limited. Developer, Klinkler never gained access to tools that permitted push notifications, thus, Talon could not support it.
Twitter says it will provide a medium for developers to gain access to a new API which will allow the old features – no restrictions. Although developers do not seem to be too happy about the way Twitter is making these changes, they do not appear totally bereaved by them.
