Twitter Is Killing Third Party Clients on 16th August, 2018

Twitter is killing its streaming API in the next couple of days — officially on 16th August — and means that your favourite third-party client of choice will lose all push notifications and streaming timelines.

Twitterrific has already implemented a system which automatically refreshes your timeline if/when streaming is unavailable. The app is supposed to automatically switch to this system when the streaming API is retired. They haven’t announced any plans in regard to implementing some sort of notification system and from what I understand, they don’t plan to.

Tweetbot, according to their FAQ, is working on providing some sort of notification system for new tweets, mentions, DMs, and follows. Tapbots state that this system will be delayed by 1-2 minutes. These will not be true push notifications.

One solution is to install the official Twitter client and turn on the relevant push notifications there, while using your third-party client to actually read your timeline and reply to your mentions. The downside is that you will not be able to e.g. reply directly from a notification, unless you want to go through Twitter’s app (which I absolutely despise).

Twitter is doing everything it can to screw up their product and I can’t help but think that this move, alienating their most loyal user-base, could be the beginning of their end. I know I’m slowly moving away from Twitter, as are many other users.

P.S. Apologies for the click-baity title, but killing notifications effectively kills the instant conversational style in which I use Twitter.