MetroTwit sails off into the sunset as ‘token limits’ take another victim

News
By Daniel Rubino
last updated

Twitter apps are pretty invaluable. They’re also highly personal. What’s super important to you may be trivial to me. That’s why it’s important to find the app that fits your needs. That’s also why it sucks when that app gets killed off. Today, that app is MetroTwit for Windows 8 and desktop.

The culprit? Once again it’s the access token limit imposed by Twitter on third party developers. We’ve seen this system kill off apps before, recently Rowi on Windows Phone.

MetroTwit for Windows 8 launched in March 2012 – almost on the two year mark. That was after leaving the desktop version that came out in 2010, which was a version still being developed (indeed, the ‘Loop’ beta version was just updated today). However, all development will cease immediately. If you own the app, it should continue working on for the foreseeable future, but pretty soon you won’t be even to be able to re-download it.

From the official site of MetroTwit:

“We are saddened to announce the end-of-life of the MetroTwit for Desktop and MetroTwit for Windows 8 apps effective immediately.Due to the “access token limit” imposed by Twitter since August 2012, we are preemptively sunsetting MetroTwit due to technical limitations of Twitter’s API which may prevent existing users from accessing the app after the limit has been crossed.Effective immediately, we will be removing the MetroTwit for Desktop installer and MetroTwit for Windows 8 Store listing to ensure the app remains usable by all current users.”

There’s not much else to say. I personally was a big fan of MetroTwit, especially for desktop where I often have to “live” while doing real work. It’s a sad state to see developers lose their apps to something so arbitrary, but we imagine this is not the end.

Luckily, Tweetium for Windows 8 seems to be filling the gap nicely. Though it has no desktop counterpart, the Modern UI app has quickly become one of our favorites for our Surface 2. Tweetro+ and glƏƏk! Are also popular alternatives.

To the developers behind MetroTwit, namely David Golden, Winston Pang, Long Zheng, thanks for your work.

Source: MetroTwit

Daniel Rubino
Daniel Rubino
Editor-in-chief

Daniel Rubino is the Editor-in-chief of Windows Central. He is also the head reviewer, podcast co-host, and analyst. He has been covering Microsoft since 2007, when this site was called WMExperts (and later Windows Phone Central). His interests include Windows, laptops, next-gen computing, and watches. He has been reviewing laptops since 2015 and is particularly fond of 2-in-1 convertibles, ARM processors, new form factors, and thin-and-light PCs. Before all this tech stuff, he worked on a Ph.D. in linguistics, watched people sleep (for medical purposes!), and ran the projectors at movie theaters because it was fun.