I can’t recall a situation like this, with an ecosystem of third-party clients collecting subscriptions and then having the first-party service yank the carpet out from under them - and their customers - with zero warning or sunset period. That’s where Tapbots and The Iconfactory are. Now imagine that the way it worked when you get fired or laid off is that you’re also suddenly on the hook to pay back the last, say, 6 months of your income. Consider the gut punch of losing your job - you stop earning income. Twitter’s kneecapping of third-party clients didn’t just mean that their future revenue was gone - it meant revenue they’d already collected from App Store subscriptions would need to go back to customers in the form of prorated refunds for the remaining months on each and every user’s annual subscriptions. But you don’t need access to Tapbots’s sales figures to surmise that Tweetbot was the company’s sole tentpole. Tapbots does too - Calcbot (a calculator and unit converter for both iOS and Mac) and Pastebot (my personal favorite clipboard history utility for Mac - I’ve been using it for years now). As I mentioned last month, The Iconfactory has a bunch of other great commercial apps (and games). Twitterrific and Tweetbot weren’t side projects - they were flagship products from small companies. It’s more of an “ Oh shit, we’re fucked” situation. That left each company with thousands and thousands of customers with months left on those subscriptions, but no functionality.įinancially, this isn’t a “ Huh, yeah, that must kinda suck” situation. A less obvious but no less serious problem is that the leading clients, Tapbots’s Tweetbot and The Iconfactory’s Twitterrific, were monetized through annual subscriptions. The obvious problem for developers of such clients, of course, is that Twitter clients are useless without the ability to connect to Twitter. Twitter didn’t even make it official that third-party clients had been banned until a week of confusion and dread had passed. You surely recall that last month, in a fit of pique, Elon Musk spitefully pulled the plug on third-party Twitter clients with no notice whatsoever, in the most chickenshit way imaginable.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |