Popular Android Twitter Client Fenix Hits Twitter’s Token Limit

By
Emmanuel Chenze
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In order to encourage the use of its own applications (where it is trying out its hand at monetization with lots of ads and promoted content) and provide a unified, similar experience across all platforms, Twitter started limiting the number of calls third party Twitter clients could make to its API. The end result was that soon, most popular third-party Twitter clients exhausted their allocated tokens and that essentially meant the end of the road for them as they could not accept any new users, a prerequisite for the growth of any product.

Third-party Twitter applications are limited to 100,000 tokens while those that were already in existence when the new API measures were put in place back in September 2012 were allowed up to 200,000 tokens after factoring in their existing large user bases and anticipated new users. But that was just that, any developer that anticipates that their application will require over 100,000 tokens needs to get in touch with Twitter. With Twitter’s declared stance that it discourages developers from building apps that replicate its core user experience, that’s as easy as a lamb convincing a hyena not to feast on it.

Now, that’s a lot of dev talk right there and it might be confusing. The low-down is this: every application made by anyone other than Twitter itself for the purposes of letting users view and post tweets just like Twitter’s own apps for iOS, Android and web do, is limited to just 100,000 users.

As a result, quite a number of popular Twitter clients across all major platforms (PC, Mac, iOS and Android) have felt the heat resulting from Twitter’s unpopular move. Carbon, a popular Twitter application on the Android platform hit its API token limits back in 2014. Another popular Android Twitter client, Falcon Pro, had hit the token wall a year earlier. The trend has continued lately with what is arguably one of the most popular Twitter applications at the moment, Fenix, being the latest to hit the token limits wall.

An enquiry on Twitter by a user on the possible cause of them not being able to sign in was met with a confirmation by the team behind Fenix that the day we all feared would come had indeed come.

https://twitter.com/fenix_app/status/724117610275721216

What this means is that the application will not be able to authenticate new users as it had maxed out its allocated tokens. So unless the developers, like their Falcon Pro counterparts, come up with a workaround to Twitter’s lame token limit or they bring back Fenix with Material Design as another application (like the way the developers behind another popular Android Twitter app, Talon, did) it’s adios Fenix!

UPDATE

After the above happened, Fenix was temporarily pulled from the Play Store. It’s since been back and yes, it allows new users.

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