Despite the absence of an official Twitter client on Windows 8, users of the popular social network have been able to access the service on Microsoft’s platform via a number of 3rd party apps. However, the free ride may be about to end.
The first casualty of Twitter’s strict, and in my opinion pathetic, new rules for developers is Tweetro, the popular Windows 8 Twitter app, which in the last 24 hours hit the infamous 100,000 user cap and, at the time of writing, remains completely broken for users who aren’t already logged in.
In an email, via Windows Observer, and attached below, Atta Elayyan, the UX Designer and Co-Founder of Lazyworm, describes the issue to users and warns that, unless you’re already logged in, you will be greeted with the error pictured above. Even if your account has already been used in the app, if you are one of the 100,000, you will still get the error. The only solution Lazyworm can think of at the moment, unless Twitter acts like a grown-up, is to make the app paid, which will mean less users for the app, but still allow them to keep it running.
It’s a sad move from Twitter, who have become the Apple of social networks, and could prove to be a fatal error, something not unheard of in the industry.
Since the official launch of Windows 8, we’ve seen a massive spike in downloads. We are averaging around 3-4K downloads a day and have had well over 200K downloads since Tweetro launched on ‘Release Preview’. Unfortunately, we’ve been victims of our own success as it appears that the app is now being blocked by Twitter due to the new Token limitations.
The app is now completely crippled and users cannot get past the OAuth screen as they are presented with an error ‘Cannot connect to service’. We were under the impression that Twitter wasn’t going to enforce the token limits until March next year (when all 3rd party apps are required to migrate to the new API’s) however this doesn’t seem to be the case.
We have reached out to Twitter for confirmation however we haven’t heard back yet.The future of Tweetro is uncertain at this stage but it’s likely that it will be pulled from the Windows Store until we can figure out the best way moving forward. At this stage, we are considering to add further polish to Tweetro and re-launch it as an exclusive ‘premium’ paid app. We would have been more than happy to continue distributing Tweetro for free as the exposure we’ve been receiving from it has been fantastic however being limited by twitter to a maximum of 100,000 users would mean we’d have to justify development via financial means.
We hope that there is a way around the token limitations, at least until the official Twitter app is available on Windows 8 however it seems that Twitter is taking a strong stance on this issue.
We’ll aim to have further announcements in the coming days with regards to what people can expect from future iterations of the app.
In the mean time, for those who are enjoying Tweetro we recommend that they refrain from uninstalling the app, removing accounts from within the app or revoking access from Twitter as there is no method accessing OAuth in its current state.