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by smoldesu 1588 days ago
I fail to see how that's an issue when other developers can make third-party clients if there's a significant demand for it. If Twitter/Facebook start forcing people to install their third-party store to access their app, then there's a massive opportunity to make a better app that's distributed through the App Store.
3 comments
ccouzens 1588 days ago
Apps can't redirect Twitter/Facebook links without Twitter/Facebook's co-operation.

This is a key feature stopping 3rd party apps being competitive.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/allowing-app...

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smoldesu 1588 days ago
Sounds like a pretty easy fix for Apple then.
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codetrotter 1588 days ago
> If Twitter/Facebook start forcing people to install their third-party store to access their app, then there's a massive opportunity to make a better app that's distributed through the App Store.

Wouldn’t Twitter, Facebook etc in turn demand that those third-party apps be taken down from the App Store?

And even if they didn’t, how is any third party going to keep up with Twitter/Facebook/etc API changes.

And what about push notifications? Those would not work with a third-party app installed via the App Store unless Twitter/Facebook/etc explicitly made it so that they supported that on their end.

For example, here’s a blog post from 2016 about how the Riot app for iOS is able to get push notifications when you self-host a Matrix server. https://thomask.sdf.org/blog/2016/12/11/riots-magical-push-n...

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smoldesu 1588 days ago
> Wouldn’t Twitter, Facebook etc in turn demand that those third-party apps be taken down from the App Store?

No? Why would they? Third-party clients are alive and well on the App Store today, and have been for years.

> And even if they didn’t, how is any third party going to keep up with Twitter/Facebook/etc API changes.

They've done a fine job of it so far.

> And what about push notifications? Those would not work with a third-party app installed via the App Store unless Twitter/Facebook/etc explicitly made it so that they supported that on their end.

It does? Check out Tweetbot or Apollo for Reddit. Both have push notifications that work fine.

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yreg 1587 days ago
They are not fully "alive and well". Twitter and Reddit have APIs because they are old enough to have made them back when it wasn't clear it would hurt their business. Can you imagine TikTok or even Instagram to add APIs to support third party clients?

Twitter has been gradually killing their APIs.[0] Reddit doesn't offer APIs for the newer features, like polls.

[0] - https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/product/2018/...

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ThatPlayer 1588 days ago
And you can always use Apple's favorite excuse of them not being a monopoly: Safari browser.
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