Twitter is no stranger to controversial decisions, and it has earned a reputation for hurting third-party app developers that rely on its service. Twitter has finally announced details for its new Account Activity API, which replaces the Streaming API third-party clients have relied on up until now.
Today, the company used its own service to say it’s “excited” to announce the new Account Activity API, which will replace the existing Streaming API on August 16.
“Today we’re excited to announce the general availability of Account Activity API. Now developers can get started for free, upgrade to premium as they scale, and move to the enterprise when they need even more subscriptions or enterprise functionality. “
“As a few developers have noticed, there’s no streaming connection capability or home timeline data, which are only used by a small number of developers (roughly 1% of monthly active apps),” writes Twitter Senior Product Manager, Kyle Weiss, in a blog post. “As we retire aging APIs, we have no plans to add these capabilities to Account Activity API or create a new streaming service for related use cases.”
The new API also introduces new pricing for apps to get Twitter activity updates, which might make them very hard to sustain. The Premium package will cost nearly $2,900/month to access the Account Activity API for a maximum of 250 users.
Twitter has delayed the shutdown of some of its legacy APIs. That is, APIs originally slated for a June 19, 2018 shutdown – including Site Streams, User Streams, and legacy Direct Message Endpoints – will now be deprecated on Wednesday, August 16, 2018.
It’s possible Twitter will work with developers to come up with affordable alternatives and even feature workarounds. August 16, 2018, is the new end-of-life date for the old Streaming API. We’ll see how many third-party apps it will affect.
Favstar has already announced it’s shutting down due to the uncertainty and constraints Twitter continues to introduce. (Favstar is an online service that tracks Twitter and Twitter usage)