Twitter has banned third-party apps like Tweetbot and Twitterific, among many others, which is equally bad for everyone involved.

There are several ways to read Twitter. One way is through your browser at twitter.com. Another way is to use the official Twitter app, which includes all the latest Twitter features, ads, and tracking technology. But many people also use independently developed apps to read and tweet. You could argue that these people are the most engaged users of Twitter, the ones willing to buy an app to do something they could otherwise do for free. And now we’re cut off.

"An absolute kick in the face to all the indie developers who worked so hard to make Twitter a better experience for so many. Twitterrific has officially been shut down today and removed from the App Store after 16 years of development. Among other firsts, they used 'tweet' to describe an update for the first time, used a bird icon for the first time, and were the first native client on iPhone and Mac," wrote Andy Baio, a media observer, on Mastodon.

We won’t get into how the ban came about, but the short story is that several prominent Twitter apps simply stopped working, with no announcement from Twitter or responses from the apps’ developers. It wasn’t until the following week that Twitter finally made the ban official, claiming that these apps had violated its terms of service for access to the Twitter API (the tools that apps use to communicate with Twitter’s backend).