Twitter is making big changes for developers as it sees a decentralized future

Twitter has announced this that the second version of its application programming interface, or API, is ready to come out of early access and become standard for developers. When Twitter announced API v2 in August 2020, it seemed like a chance to rebuild not only the infrastructure on which developers build their apps and bots, but also Twitter’s relationships with the people who use their platform.

API v2 takes over API v1.1’s task of allowing third-party clients to access and interact with Tweets and let other developers create bots that do different things across the platform (such as introduce people to the weekend or collect analyzes for companies). When I talked to Amir Shevat, Twitter’s head of developer platform, about what the official switch to API v2 meant for the platform, he told me it would make things better for users who wanted third-party Twitter clients. He also revealed that the change was another step in the company’s goal of becoming a decentralized platform on which developers built apps and experiences on top, making conversations better in ways that Twitter itself could not.

In its press release, Twitter says it removes restrictions from its developer policy on “how to build with Twitter’s core features and limits the number of users you can support through your app.” Shevat elaborated on this, saying the new policy will make clear what is allowed and make it easier for developers to compete with Twitter in ways that the company did not allow before. This can have a real impact on how Twitter users interact with the service, as it gives developers more freedom to build third-party Twitter clients like Tweetbot, Twitterrific or Fenix.

Although there are unofficial Twitter apps available, the company’s relationship with the developers behind these apps has been mixed – limits on how many users could use a third-party app, as well as lack of features, meant that the actual way to access Twitter on has been using its official app. This is in contrast to some other social platforms like Reddit where many users recommend apps made by indie developers like Apollo or Narwhal over the official one.

When Twitter first announced API v2, it looked like the company was trying to be more friendly to those looking to create their own customers. It seems to have worked out for some – Tweetbot’s latest version uses the new API, and Twitter has recently added API support for newer features like Super Followers and the ability to tweet with restrictions on who can reply.

Paul Haddad, one of the developers of Tweetbot, told me that calling the previous guidelines rocky was “really understating it” and that he would not be surprised if other developers wrote Twitter’s message off as cheap talk. From his point of view, however, Twitter’s API team has recently been better at communicating openly with developers (it repeats a comment that Shevat made about building publicly), and he said the API had “changed more in that last year than in the 5th before then. ” Haddad also told me that Twitter’s policy change assured him that it was a good decision to base Tweetbot 6 on API v2.

However, Twitter has bigger ambitions than developers can make really good Twitter clients. Its press release says the company is “doubling down” on making it easier for developers to “drive future innovation on Twitter.” The company says it wants to see developers help improve the community, come up with better content recommendations for users, and generally make the platform a friendlier place to be.

I asked Shevat why Twitter was looking to external developers to “improve the health and safety of the public conversation,” as the press release states, instead of doing the work itself. He said Twitter wants to let developers tackle issues that would not be practical for the company to deal with – his example was a vegetarian developer working on an algorithm that would let other like-minded users avoid content about meat that they could find disturbing.

He also linked the decision to Twitter’s interest in making its platform decentralized. He said the goal was for Twitter to end up as iOS or Android – a platform that was interesting because of the apps and features that other developers built on. Twitter has been working to become, as CEO Jack Dorsey said earlier this year, a “standard for the public conversation layer on the Internet” instead of a traditional social media platform.

It calls these efforts Project Bluesky, and the Bluesky team is tasked with making the networking technology Twitter needs to actually become a distributed platform (there are, of course, teams working with crypto as well). API v2, Shevat explained, was part of Twitter working toward that ambitious goal.

To help make the platform easier to get started with, Twitter is making some changes to the levels that determine what developers can do with its platform. It creates an “essential access” that lets you start playing with the Twitter API without having to wait for a manual approval process (Shevat told me it was a matter of seconds, instead of the hours or days it used to take ) and which will let you pull 500,000 tweets a month.

If you are willing to go through the application process, you can access the Elevated tier, which lets you use Twitter’s API to pull 2 ​​million tweets a month. That’s a lot of tweets, enough for 80 percent of the developers currently using API v1.1, according to Shevat. As a bonus, if your project is currently using API v2, you should automatically be able to access Elevated tier.

Although rewriting an API is an ambitious task, especially for a company as large as Twitter, it is clear that the platform has much greater ambitions. It’s hard to say if it will be able to achieve them, but at least it has been able to rewrite its API and adjust its policies to make things easier for those who want to build on the platform . With v2 now official, and v1.1 put in maintenance mode (gets only “critical bug fixes”), developers now have more freedom with what they want to create and more responsibility in Twitter’s eyes. To top it all off, users may end up getting a better experience out of the deal.