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Comment by startupdiscuss | Hacker News Reader

This allows the following to happen:

1. If someone can make a better MacOS client, they should do so and charge for it!

2. Customers can probably pick up a free client from someone who wants to play around or pay a little more for a pro client

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"TweetBot" has been the canonical "good" Mac Twitter client for a while now. But there are strict limits on the number of clients Twitter allow for third party companies, which is why it's so expensive - so that they do not hit that limit.

The whole situation is a mess.

I am not familiar with these limits. (I mean, I know they have some, but not how they work).

Can't any client just read off the web version? Is there something preventing that?

Technically yes, you can imitate the web Twitter client and scrape that. However it’s against their terms of service.

Also technically it’s hard because it’s undocumented and they can change it at any time with no notice, which would cause your client to break.

Building on twitter is like trusting that any new Google product will be around in a few years, a huge developer risk.

Twitter killed off third party developers as ruthlessly as Nintendo killed third parties back in NES days.

Yea, the whole FalconPro thing still has users angry.

The consensus is with you. I wonder if they could win it back somehow. Or at least make it easy enough so that building a client is low risk.

Twitter does not want third party clients, and limits them from getting "too many" users https://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/08/17/twitter-4/

"too many" is 100,000 IIRC.

But, doesn't Twitter have sufficient restrictions on the use of their API as to make this not really worthwhile?

I see from all the other responses too that this is the case. I thought if it was available to their own web client, another local client could just effectively scrape that data.

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