It’s been hard for us at MacStories to watch as the makers of two of our favorite apps have been treated with such callous disregard by Twitter, which owes no small portion of its past success to both apps. Tapbots and The Iconfactory have played an important part in the Apple developer community for a very long time, and their Twitter clients were two of the best ever created. If users do nothing, they’ll receive a refund that will be credited to their App Store account automatically by Apple. Tweetbot also offers to transfer a user’s Tweetbot subscription to Tapbots’ new Mastodon app, Ivory, which Federico recently reviewed and is excellent. Now, both apps give subscribers the option to indicate that they don’t want a refund. To try to mitigate the damage, both Tweetbot and Twitterrific were updated this week with new interfaces. That’s how the App Store works, and it’s potentially devastating to both companies given how events played out.
As a result, both Tapbots and The Iconfactory are faced with refunding the 70-85% of subscription revenues that they received on a pro-rated basis. Because they had no notice, neither company had a chance to suspend new subscriptions or take other actions to deal with a change that, under the best of circumstances, would pose massive challenges to their development teams. Tweetbot and Twitterrific were both subscription-based apps. The ramifications of Twitter’s actions are unlike anything we’ve ever seen before on the App Store. One moment the apps worked the next, they didn’t. Instead, as I wrote in January, Twitter eliminated access to its API for many third-party apps, including Tweetbot by Tapbots and Twitterrific by The Iconfactory, with no notice at all and then made up an excuse for why they did so after the fact. That’s not how things went down with Twitter. It’s the right thing to do regardless of what any terms of service say. Usually, when a big company shuts down an API, they give customers time to prepare.
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