What's the deal with Microsoft and Twitter (warning -> rant)

[mistacombs]

Android and iOS have a full featured official Twitter App. Blackberry's app was already close to being as good as the others and now it is updated again:
Twitter for BlackBerry updated to version 4.0 ahead of impending BB10 launch | The Verge

Meanwhile, Windows Phone 8 has a lackluster official app and Windows 8 has nothing from Twitter.

Rant I know.

 

[kevin2577]

Luckily the 3rd party app situation (for Twitter and in general) is SO MUCH better on Windows Phone. I'd recommend trying MeTweets, Birdsong, Gleek, and my favorite, Rowi, for your Twitter needs.

On Windows 8 Twitter has announced that they are developing an application, so that is forthcoming

 

[foxbat121]

If I remembered correctly, the recent licensing change from Twitter will put a break further on any 3rd party app (each app only allow 250k tokens max IIRC). So, if a 3rd party twitter is really popular, it will die when it reaches 250k users.

All this has no one but Twitter itself to blame. Twitter is a lousy company. It repeatedly changes its API to break 3rd party apps over and over while itself never really developed anything official for Windows/Windows phone platform.

 

[kevin2577]

Well the rule is that twitter apps can have up to twice as many tokens as when they implemented the new rule, or 250k, whichever is more, so many popular apps have far more than 250k tokens. Also the apps will not stop working, they will simply be unable to access additional tokens, so they will have to be taken off sale or the market and the current users will be the only ones.

And yes, twitter is being quite ****ty to their developers who helped them build their network, but we should at least be clear on the rules of their ****tiness

 

[foxbat121]

That simply means no one will ever invest to create a new great Twitter app for any platform. There is no incentive to see your potential user base be hard limited to 250k.

When I was using Android phones, there isn't any good official Twitter app there either. At least on WP platform, we still have the people hub integration which takes a lot of load and saves battery off our phone from constantly syncing Fackbook and Twitter, both are horrible in mobile app support.