Users of the very popular 3rd party Twitter app Tweetro just received this email from Atta Elayyan the UX Designer and Co-Founder of Lazyworm Applications Ltd. and it is not good news:

Since the official launch of Windows 8, we’ve seen a massive spike in downloads.  We are averaging around 3-4K downloads a day and have had well over 200K downloads since Tweetro launched on ‘Release Preview’.  Unfortunately, we’ve been victims of our own success as it appears that the app is now being blocked by Twitter due to the new Token limitations.

The app is now completely crippled and users cannot get past the OAuth screen as they are presented with an error ‘Cannot connect to service’.  We were under the impression that Twitter wasn’t going to enforce the token limits until March next year (when all 3rd party apps are required to migrate to the new API’s) however this doesn’t seem to be the case.
We have reached out to Twitter for confirmation however we haven’t heard back yet.

The future of Tweetro is uncertain at this stage but it’s likely that it will be pulled from the Windows Store until we can figure out the best way moving forward.  At this stage, we are considering to add further polish to Tweetro and re-launch it as an exclusive ‘premium’ paid app.  We would have been more than happy to continue distributing Tweetro for free as the exposure we’ve been receiving from it has been fantastic however being limited by twitter to a maximum of 100,000 users would mean we’d have to justify development via financial means.

We hope that there is a way around the token limitations, at least until the official Twitter app is available on Windows 8 however it seems that Twitter is taking a strong stance on this issue.

We’ll aim to have further announcements in the coming days with regards to what people can expect from future iterations of the app.

In the mean time, for those who are enjoying Tweetro we recommend that they refrain from uninstalling the app, removing accounts from within the app or revoking access from Twitter as there is no method accessing OAuth in its current state.

Included in the email was a graphic showing the downloads of the app over time and you can see the spike that occurred as Windows 8 was launched on 26 October 2012.

I hope Twitter responds soon so this can be sorted out.  I really like Tweetro on Windows 8 and am more than happy to pay for a premium version to help these guys out if necessary.

However, in the interim do whatever you have to so that you do not have to ask for authorization for the app from Twitter until this is figured out.

Unfortunately, I think this is just the beginning of the end of third party Twitter apps with the stranglehold Twitter is placing on the service for third party access.