Tweetbot and Twitterrific Ask Users for Help after Twitter Client Ban
At Daring Fireball, John Gruber writes:
Twitter’s kneecapping of third-party clients didn’t just mean that their future revenue was gone — it meant revenue they’d already collected from App Store subscriptions would need to go back to customers in the form of prorated refunds for the remaining months on each and every user’s annual subscriptions. Consider the gut punch of losing your job — you stop earning income. It’s brutal. Now imagine that the way it worked when you get fired or laid off is that you’re also suddenly on the hook to pay back the last, say, 6 months of your income. That’s where Tapbots and The Iconfactory are.
After Elon Musk pulled the plug on third-party Twitter clients without notice, the small companies behind Tweetbot and Twitterrific face an existential financial crisis brought on by the need to refund pro-rated subscriptions. If you subscribe to either app, I encourage you to consider opening it and tapping the “I don’t need a refund” button to help the developers. Tapbots also offers an option to transfer your subscription time to its Ivory client for Mastodon (see “Mastodon: A New Hope for Social Networking,” 27 January 2023).
I’m a firm supporter of small businesses so I agree with the idea of not requesting a refund. However, Gruber’s analogy is wrong because app subscriptions are a pre-payment while salaries pay for work already done.
Yeah, it’s not a perfect analogy—he was just trying to show how it felt to the companies in question because they would have made plans, hired people, and so on based on that promised income.
Now Tweetbot has changed its iOS icon to an angel. I needed to download it to pass my subscription over to Ivory