Feb 25, 2013
Enjoy Twitter app Falcon Pro? Well, too bad: [the app has officially run out of user tokens]http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/02/23/falcon-pro-hits-100k-token-limit-another-twitter-client-bites-the-dust/(). This means that users trying to sign in to the app will discover that they cannot do so, thanks to Twitter’s new rules about third-party API clients. Basically, new apps can max out at 100,000 user tokens (older apps get two times what they had before when Twitter announced the API changes) and that’s it.
Now, here’s the problem: this does not mean that the creators of Falcon Pro have sold 100,000 copies of their app. Additional user tokens have been taken up by pirated users. Users who download the app, sign in, and then refund it within the 15-minute window are not relinquishing their user tokens unless they disable the app from Twitter’s application settings.
This does not mean that all hope is lost for Falcon Pro users. They may be able to renew all tokens, but with a confirmation system in place to confirm that a user has legitimately bought the app, and not just pirated it. Unfortunately, they can’t circumvent the token limit by re-releasing different versions of the same app with different sets of user tokens as it is against Twitter’s API terms of service. There is also a petition in place to try and convince Twitter to raise the token limit, but there are no reported instances of Twitter actually raising the limit on an app, either through internal requests or external demands. Both are being attempted with Falcon Pro. This is unsurprising because Twitter is actively trying to drive users to official apps and services.
Thus, there’s a very good chance that what’s going to happen in the future is that Twitter clients are going to get a lot more expensive. This is what Tweetbot on Mac did. Its $19.99 price was subject to some criticism, but in the face of a maximum of 100,000 sales, it wound up being a problem. A drop in quality could also occur, as it will get a lot harder for developers to make a living off of a Twitter app. Long-term, it could truly be the death of third-party Twitter apps, which is a shame because there are still quality gaps with the official apps, though this may be Twitter forcing users into their new way of user interaction.
Falcon Pro remains on Google Play for re-installation purposes, but it’s inadvisable to actually purchase it as it will not let users log in. The Falcon Pro developers apparently had no idea when they would hit the token limit either, as Twitter gives no indication themselves of when it is hit.
