It’s August 16th, and if you’re using third-party Twitter apps that means today is the day they become far less useful. Twitter is turning off the APIs for key features, essentially hobbling all client apps except its own.

Twitter API shut down for third-party apps

Twitter drops key feature support for third-party client apps

Twitter’s API changes kill real-time streaming in third-party apps. That means you can’t watch new tweets appear in your stream as they post. They also delay, or in some cases block, push notifications.

Third-party apps can still update your stream automatically, but not in real time, and there are limits on how often client apps can make update requests. The work around is to manually update. In most iPhone and iPad apps, that’s a swipe down gesture when you’re at the top of your feed.

[What Features Would Break After the Proposed Twitter API Change?]

[About Twitter’s API Stupidity]

Twitter is trying to push subscribers into using its own apps and website for posting and keeping up on everyone else’s tweets. The problem with that is Twitter’s apps have felt feature limited compared to third-party options, and not everyone wants to use the social network in a web browser.

The end result may be that the people who have been most engaged on the platform start using it less because they can’t stay on top of their stream and posts any more.

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