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One of the most popular third-party Android Twitter apps – Fenix – got pulled from the Play Store after its founder confirmed that the service has reached the so-called Twitter token limit. The revelation was appropriately made on Twitter over the weekend after one of Fenix users tweeted that the service was unable to authenticate new users, which the official app account promptly confirmed.
In case you weren’t aware, Twitter has been enforcing the said token limit for years now. Basically, one token equals one user of a third-party Twitter service and the popular microblogging platform is only allowing a maximum of 100,000 tokens per an unofficial Twitter client. In other words, after a service authenticates 100,000 users, it can no longer authenticate more and is effectively commercially doomed as social apps don’t exactly mix well with an inability to grow their user bases. Falcon Pro was the first third-party service which hit the 100k token limit over three years ago while Carbon and Talon apps did the same in 2014. Although Twitter decides on a potential reset of the token limit on a case-by-case basis, that usually doesn’t happen and as most third-party Twitter apps have a one-time price and no other monetization options (after all, few would pay for an unofficial Twitter client just to get bombarded with ads), that’s the point at which they simply stop making money and developers cease their support for them.
Report from July of last year suggested Twitter is considering dropping this limitation in the near future, but nothing has obviously been done on that front so far. Even though the developer of Fenix didn’t specifically say that the app is getting pulled from the Play Store, that seems to be the case at the moment. If you bought Fenix at an earlier point in time, a Twitter token connected to your account should already exist so you’ll be able to use it to access the microblogging platform in the future but you probably shouldn’t expect any more app updates. For what it’s worth, the developer at least urged the users who recently bought the app and are unable to authenticate their account to contact him for a refund.