Unauthorized “gray” third-party clients were a more viable option in the days when vendors couldn’t easily update first-party client program installations in the wild, so the API had to be backwards compatible.
But it’s not really like that for Twitter. They can do rapid updates to the iOS and Android apps, and any holdovers of old client versions would be a relatively small segment.
I recall Microsoft tried to build and maintain their own YouTube client for Windows Phone around 2011-12. That’s probably the last time a major tech company tried this approach and it was out of massive desperation. Google seemed to make a special effort to break the app.
There's probably a need for legislation here. It's completely normal and vital for competition that you can make things that are (adversarially) interoperable with others in the physical realm and you can't really be stopped (as long as you don't just copy).
That's not really a thing once you involve software. It's trivial to lock things down using cryptography and constant changes, making any kind of interoperability entirely infeasible.
As far as I understand this is pretty unprecedented and very bad for an efficient market.
Idk, having other, especially adversarial, companies between service and a customer just sounds like a recipe for bad things being pushed. Like IE toolbars. Or addblock (i use it, but it certainly has societal downsides). Or all the things our ISP wants to do with our traffic. You'd need unimaginably well crafted policy for this to not go south and have us complain about the opposite shortly thereafter.
It's straightforward anti-trust - currently Twitter-the-company is bundling Twitter-the-client-software with Twitter-the-service, using the market position of the latter to maintain the market position of the former.
I have been running the same copy of Facebook and Twitter and certainly YouTube on my phone for many years now. The only people who have been able to try to push updates at people like that are Snapchat, and even they have a hard time doing it quickly and at scale: and it only results in a temporary loss of service for the alternative clients!
(And, even then, most of the success for Snapchat comes because 1) the official clients for Snapchat go far out of their way to do crazy obfuscation techniques and 2) they wield a ban hammer over end users over trivial infractions making it difficult to test; I fail to see how such would work for YouTube, where third-party clients are, in fact, plentiful).
At F8 back forever ago, the reason Zuckerberg cited for having to give up on "Move Fast and Break Things" and go to "Move Fast with Stable Infra" is because they in fact couldn't rapidly push updates to their apps across the myriad supported platforms the way they could with their website, and so they effectively had to maintain API compatibility across ridiculously long timespans of client versions... much long enough to let the alternative clients reverse engineer the new builds and have updates out before Facebook can just kill service to the old ones.
> But it’s not really like that for Twitter. They can do rapid updates to the iOS and Android apps
They can do rapid updates to the apps but doesn't it take time for users to apply the update? Where I work you can't expect people to update their app right away, it takes days or even weeks for people to catch up.
Twitter put in a reasonable about of effort to keep old clients working and compatible with backend changes. We had checks in place to avoid breaking changes to clients that were years old, and when things did occasionally get through they were rolled back very, very quickly. If I remember correctly there are people with old devices/jailbreaks running things like clients on like iOS 7 and things still work for them for the most part.
> They can do rapid updates to the iOS and Android apps
Sort of! I haven't updated my iOS install in many months. I don't see the new fake blue checks or a handful of other dumb new features, it's kind of great!
But it’s not really like that for Twitter. They can do rapid updates to the iOS and Android apps, and any holdovers of old client versions would be a relatively small segment.
I recall Microsoft tried to build and maintain their own YouTube client for Windows Phone around 2011-12. That’s probably the last time a major tech company tried this approach and it was out of massive desperation. Google seemed to make a special effort to break the app.