Twitter seems to have rolled back the last week’s forced TweetDeck update. Several users have confirmed that they can now go back to the older and much better version of the tool. The older version of the app is available to all TweetDeck users here at Android Headlines as well. The company hasn’t officially announced anything, though.
TweetDeck, which can be called Twitter on steroids, offers advanced features that cater to the needs of power users. It’s an official Twitter tool. The company has been working on a big overhaul of the tool since July 2021, and it finally debuted last week. But the update came with a huge limitation. Twitter made it paid feature that users can unlock with a Twitter Blue subscription. Free users could only try it for a month.
Worse yet, many people didn’t like the updated version. Meanwhile, Twitter removed its legacy APIs, breaking the older TweetDeck interface. This forced everyone to the new interface. Thankfully, the company has restored those APIS, and the age-old and much-loved TweetDeck is back. You can go into your TweetDeck Account settings, select the TweetDeck version, and switch back with ease.
Twitter even lets you opt out of the new TweetDeck. Unfortunately, this may be a temporary reversal that the company made to fix some internal issues. That’s because it hasn’t officially announced this change. We have little hope that it would allow users to continue using the older TweetDeck when the new version is here with a paywall. Nonetheless, as long as it’s here, you can use it.
The latest API changes from Twitter also restore third-party apps
Earlier this year, Twitter banned third-party apps citing API rules. It blocked free access to its legacy APIs, effectively rendering those apps unusable. But the latest API changes from the company seem to have restored the apps. Roberto Doering, the developer of a third-party Twitter app called Harpy, recently discovered that switching to the “old v1 API” gets the app working again (via The Verge).
However, this doesn’t mean they will maintain Harpy again. Twitter is likely to close doors to its legacy APIs again, so there is no point wasting resources on it. The company said last week that it removed legacy APIs to block tech companies from scraping its data to train AI models. Due to this very reason, it also imposed a limit on the number of tweets users can see in a day. Twitter says it’s a temporary measure but hasn’t confirmed when the limits will be lifted.