Twitter announced its plan to retire Site Streams & User Streams, and replace them with the Account Activity API (currently in beta), last year. But it was rescheduled for June 19, 2018, following complaints from top Twitter clients, like: Tweetbot, Twitterific and Talon who argued that the upcoming API changes could potentially break the way their apps work.

The problem stems from the fact that some third-party developers haven’t obtained access to the new API — and the changes would definitely take some time to be implemented correctly.

And the new API have got some limitations that could keep apps from working as they usually do, which will potentially break functions like push notifications and timeline updates. Also, it isn't clear if the Account Activity API is capable of handling real-time data as is the case with User Stream and Site Stream APIs.

Albeit, Twitter's developer documentation states that "the Account Activity API delivers real-time access to all activities…", and the standard version of the API accepts only 35 subscriptions.

The aforementioned developers believe this means their apps could only support 35 Twitter accounts for push notifications and won't support automatic timeline refresh since client devices typically aren't running web servers.

Twitter, however hasn't scheduled any new date for when it will retire the streaming API, but maintains that it’ll give “at least 90 days notice” before eventually effacing it.

Upcoming Twitter API changes could break the way apps work



Twitter announced its plan to retire Site Streams & User Streams, and replace them with the Account Activity API (currently in beta), last year. But it was rescheduled for June 19, 2018, following complaints from top Twitter clients, like: Tweetbot, Twitterific and Talon who argued that the upcoming API changes could potentially break the way their apps work.

The problem stems from the fact that some third-party developers haven’t obtained access to the new API — and the changes would definitely take some time to be implemented correctly.

And the new API have got some limitations that could keep apps from working as they usually do, which will potentially break functions like push notifications and timeline updates. Also, it isn't clear if the Account Activity API is capable of handling real-time data as is the case with User Stream and Site Stream APIs.

Albeit, Twitter's developer documentation states that "the Account Activity API delivers real-time access to all activities…", and the standard version of the API accepts only 35 subscriptions.

The aforementioned developers believe this means their apps could only support 35 Twitter accounts for push notifications and won't support automatic timeline refresh since client devices typically aren't running web servers.

Twitter, however hasn't scheduled any new date for when it will retire the streaming API, but maintains that it’ll give “at least 90 days notice” before eventually effacing it.

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