Twitter 3rd Party Apps

[Heidi Hall]

Thirdparty apps are applications built on the X platform by external developers, and are not owned or operated by X. When you connect a third-party app to your X account, you are granting that app access to use your account. Depending on its permissions, an authorized app may be able to obtain information from and use your account in various ways, such as reading your posts, seeing who you follow, updating your profile, posting posts on your behalf, accessing your Direct Messages, or seeing your email address. You can learn more about the specific access in the App permissions section below. Addiontally you can choose to log out of your active X sessions.

From your Settings and privacy, go to the Apps and sessions section of your account settings. Below Sessions, all of the active login sessions connected to your account will be displayed. You can see the location and time of login.

Analytics: Access your advertising data, including your campaigns, audiences, business and ad account information (such as account name, ID, and creation date, business name, timezone, and users), ad account and user settings (such as notification email, contact phone number and extensions, industry type, email subscription settings, and tax settings), and creatives and media.

Campaign and account management: Access your advertising data as described above, create and manage your advertising data (such as media, creatives, campaigns, and audiences) for you, and manage your account (such as account name, industry type, account and user settings, etc.).

Depending on the app, you may be presented with a consent dialog from X asking you to authorize the app to use your account or you may be prompted to grant the app access to the X accounts on your iOS device.

If you are prompted to grant the app access to the X accounts on your iOS device, use the Connect button to connect the app. If you have multiple X accounts on your device, you may need to select the account that you wish to connect to the app.

If you are routed to the X for Android app, use the Allow or Connect button to connect the app. If you have multiple X accounts on your device, you may need to select the account you wish to connect to the app.

Go to the Apps and sessions section of your account settings. All of the apps connected to your account will be displayed. You can see the specific permissions that each app has to use your account listed under the app name and description.

Immediately revoke its access on the Apps and sessions section of your account settings and change your password. If you are experiencing problems with an app, please read the compromised accounts article for more information.

Third-party tools created by developers add new functionalities and can enhance your X experience. These tools are self-serve, and many are free to use. You can learn more about some of the tools currently available below.

Right now, people on iOS and web may see and interact with post Tiles that include text, images, videos, or other elements like a button from people in the initial test group. These formats are designed to easily engage with content and make your timeline more dynamic and visual.

When someone in our initial test group posts a post Tile, people on iOS and web who are part of this experiment will automatically see the post Tiles they post on the Home timeline. Like post Cards, post Tiles render automatically when you paste a URL.

Twitter's iOS app, and website, are a mess of ads, recommended posts, "Liked by" tweets, algorithmically trending topics and news, the "For You" default column, and bugs. I find it a noisy, messy place to be.

I'd say I've always been more a Tweetbot user, never a "Twitter" user. If you never had the pleasure of using it, Tweetbot was this beautiful iOS Twitter client; it felt like it'd been hand-crafted with such love and care for details, with incredible design, carefully-considered user experience, better features than the core Twitter app, and best of all, a chronological timeline that showed every tweet, in order, and synced to where I was up to across my iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Just as a side note on how important third-party Twitter clients were to the development of Twitter; it was third-party apps that came up with the word "tweet", that first used a bird image for branding, that first introduced muting, and even invented wider OS behaviours like pulling to refresh. The Verge has a great article here with more detail.

I follow people very intentionally on Twitter: everyone on my following list brings some sort of value to my life, and I don't want to miss any of their writing! Since starting my Twitter account 13 years ago I've come across so many business ideas, inspiration, recommended tools, curiosity-led rabbit holes, and mind-expanding discussions from the smart, inspiring people I follow, so missing out on tweets due to the main Twitter app thinking it knows what I want to see is just not why I use the platform.

I've been a huge fan of a tool called Mailbrew for the last year or so. The idea is that you can build your own email digests from almost any source on the internet, and have that digest delivered to your inbox, rather than spending hours scrolling timelines.

I've had a daily digest sent every morning at 6am for a year now, full of the latest posts from my favourite tech sites, uploads from my favourite YouTubers, top posts in certain subreddits, Hackernews, the weather, Product Hunt, mentions of designstripe or DrawKit on Twitter, etc. It's a super useful tool, and I recommend it to anyone.

So what I've done is move every single person I'm following into a single Twitter List called "Twitter Digest" (use a bulk list-management tool to speed this up), and now every morning at 6am I get a nice, long email, filled with every tweet everyone I follow has posted within the last 24 hours.

So that's my solution! I'm sort of hopeful we all move over to Mastodon or similar, there's some really interesting potential around the idea of a universal timeline that links together multiple platforms and services, as Craig Hockenberry, one of the creators of Twitterific, talks about at the end of this post here, but until then, this seems to be working nicely.

When Twitter rolled out the pricing for its paid API tiers last week, many indie developers announced they would have to shut down apps they had made for the platform. These distraught devs included those that had created services making hundreds to thousands of dollars a month, as the new API subscription tiers from Twitter would even priced them out.

On early Tuesday morning, a number of tech founders found that Twitter had suspended their apps from accessing the Twitter API. Twitter previously said last week that it would "deprecate current access" to the old free Twitter API day plans over the next 30 days. However, the move to suspend the API access today took many by surprise.

"Tweet Hunter has been banned from Twitter," tweeted the founder of the Twitter content-creating web app TweetHunter.io. "5,426 Twitter power users are affected. No warning, no email, nada. We have no idea why."

"@TwitterDev is this the new developer ecosystem that you're excited about?" tweeted the founder of the social media management app Publer. "Despite the 30 days notice and the Enterprise application wait time, you force us to switch today."

Some other Twitter-based apps, like FeedHive, have also been cut off today. However, the founder of FeedHive has previously said it was not planning to pay for the high-priced Enterprise API offerings.

It's important to note what many of these apps do. Unlike Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Twitterific, which Musk's Twitter banned earlier this year, none of the apps replicate Twitter's platform. Users still have to regularly go to the company's own website, mobile apps, or clients. What these apps do is help facilitate more content creation for Twitter and encourage usage of the platform. By destroying its third-party app ecosystem, Twitter is essentially shooting itself in the foot.

In a private Slack group which has now ballooned to nearly 850 members who specifically run Twitter-based apps, many still hold out hope that Musk will hear their pleas and roll out more affordable API plans than the $42,000 per month entry point for Enterprise tiers. The company's actions today affecting even those businesses who are interested in paying those pricey API subscription plans do not bode well for the future of third-party apps for Twitter.

Every day many thousands of developers make requests to the X API. To help manage the sheer volume of these requests, limits are placed on the number of requests that can be made. These limits help us provide the reliable and scalable API that our developer community relies on.

The maximum number of requests that are allowed is based on a time interval, some specified period or window of time. The most common request limit interval is fifteen minutes. If an endpoint has a rate limit of 900 requests/15-minutes, then up to 900 requests over any 15-minute interval is allowed.

The following table lists the rate limits for the X API v2 Free access. These rate limits are also documented on each endpoint's API Reference page and also displayed in the developer portal's products section.

The following table lists the rate limits for the X API v2 Basic access. These rate limits are also documented on each endpoint's API Reference page and also displayed in the developer portal's products section.

The following table lists the rate limits for the X API v2 Pro access. These rate limits are also documented on each endpoint's API Reference page and also displayed in the developer portal's products section.

Users' rate limits are shared across all Apps that they have authorized. For example, if a specific user likes 20 Posts using one developer App and likes 20 Posts on a separate developer App within a 15 minute time period, the 40 requests would pull out of the same per user rate limit bucket. That means that if this endpoint has a user rate limit of 1,000 requests per 15 minutes, then this user would be able to like 960 more Posts within that 24 hour period of time across all X and third-party apps.

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