The last time Twitter made changes to its official API, third-party Twitter clients were largely affected with important features removed. However, the company announced today that some of these features will be added back to the Twitter v2 API, in addition to more options that will benefit third-party apps.
The Twitter API allows developers to create apps that can use the Twitter platform for multiple purposes, and there are several apps that depend on it, including Tweetbot, Twitteriffic, and more.
In 2018, Twitter limited push notifications and automatic timeline updates of its API, which changed how third-party Twitter clients work. While the company has never discussed the real reasons behind that decision, it’s not hard to believe that Twitter tried to take down these apps as they don’t promote ads that generate revenue to the social network.
Today, Twitter is announcing its new Twitter API v2, which was completely rebuilt with new features. One of the highlights of the new Twitter API is the real-time tweets stream — one of the options removed in the past. Third-party apps can once again load new tweets as they’re published and not just after a period of time.
Other changes to the API include conversation threading, polls, pinned tweets, better spam filter, and advanced search. The Twitter v2 API will be available on three different levels: Standard, Academic Research, and Business.
The Standard level offers access to basic features of Twitter for free, which is useful for development purposes and small apps. The Academic Research level allows developers to access more data about public conversations such as user behavior on a specific subject. And with the Business level, developers will have full access to Twitter features and data, which is great for popular apps.
As TechCrunch has pointed out, Twitter is making it easy to move from one tier to another, but the company hasn’t specified the cost of each one. Even so, this is definitely great news for developers of third-party Twitter clients, as they can now make their apps more attractive with features that were restricted to the official Twitter app so far.
Twitter was planning to release the Twitter v2 API today, but it was delayed until next week due to the recent incident involving multiple accounts that were hacked. You can read more about the new API on Twitter’s Developer Blog.
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