[smoldesu]

> 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.

[yreg]

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/...