Twitter has gone through a lot of changes since Elon Musk took over, and the most recent came as a surprise to many.

After cutting off prominent app makers like Tweetbot and Twitterific, Twitter today quietly updated its developer terms to ban third-party clients altogether.

Twitterific was a 3rd party app and the first desktop client for Twitter. When Twitter first launched, it was only a mobile app, sites like Twitterific help bridge the gap from mobile to desktop. Tweetbot was sort of the same. It allowed you to use Twitter through their app instead of the official app and add a few added benefits, like muted keywords, prior to Twitter themselves launching such a feature.

Twitter’s attitude toward third-party clients has long been permissive and even supportive, with the company going so far as to remove a section from its developer terms that discouraged devs from replicating its core service. But that seems to have changed under CEO Elon Musk’s leadership.

The decision seems unlikely to foster goodwill toward Twitter at a time when the platform faces challenges on a number of fronts. In a blog post, Twitterrific’s Sean Heber called Twitter “increasingly capricious” and a company he “no longer recognize[d] as trustworthy nor want to work with any longer.”

Twitter is under immense pressure to turn a profit — or at least break even — as advertisers flee the platform, spurred by unpredictable, fast-changing content policies.

The company, which has $12.5 billion in debt, is on the hook for $300 million in its first interest payment and has lost an estimated $4 billion in value since Musk acquired it at the end of October 2022.

As Twitter currently has no communications department, nobody could really reach out to them for a comment.

You can, however, follow us on Twitter at @Fleshbot to keep up with all of the latest news!