Twitter on Friday announced an important update to its “API v2,” which can be used to create third-party clients for Twitter. Developers now have the ability to access the reverse chronological timeline as users can via the official Twitter App.
In a post on Twitter Community (via The Verge), a Twitter engineer details what actually changes with the update. Previously, developers had to use an old API to get the most recent tweets and retweets from users, which resulted in a more complicated development process, not to mention the limits that the old API has.
Paul Haddad, the developer behind the popular Twitter client “Tweetbot,” explained that API v1. 1 lets the app request updates to the home timeline 15 times every 15 minutes, with a limit of up to 800 tweets for each user. With today’s update, third-party apps support up to 180 requests in the same timeframe, with a limit of up to 3,200 tweets.
Not only is the new API better for getting the latest tweets, but it should also make the process of developing a Twitter client less complicated, since developers now no longer need to implement support for v1. 1 and v2.
The Twitter API v2 was officially released last year as a response to developers, who had always complained about the lack of access to important features of the social network in the old API. For instance, Twitter’s third-party apps had no access to things like polls, cards, and metrics with API v1.1.
It ‘s worth noting that while developers can implement Twitter API v2 for free, unlocking it for a large amount of apps and tweets requires elevated access through a paid plan.
With these latest improvements to the API, it seems that Twitter has finally changed its mind when it comes to supporting developers working on third-party clients for its platform. The update to the Twitter API v2 with reverse chronological timeline is now available for all developers.
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