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App piracy is obviously hurting developers and often puts a strain on customer support for those paid apps because developers have to spend time dealing with complaints from these software pirates when they are clearly not entitled to complain. Over the years, developers have come up with ways to discourage piracy and to identify pirated copies so they don’t have to waste their time. The most popular of which is disabling features. Tapbots, the company behind the popular Twitter app Tweetbot decided that pirated copies will automatically load up this text into the composition window and let people send them on their own. These are not automated text, these are voluntarily tweets sent by app pirates.
Twitter users running Tweetbot for Mac version 0.8.0 may be seeing their app timing out or refusing to launch today seemingly for no apparent reason. As it turns out, Tapbots has released version 0.8.1 of the beta release which doesn’t actually offer anything new in terms of features but perhaps as a maintenance update to replace the previous version which presumably expired today.
Version 0.8.1 has a creation date of September 26, 2012 and still does not allow existing users to add more accounts to the app, which the company is purposefully doing to prevent exhaustion of valuable user tokens. As it explains on the blog post, accounts that are removed from the app cannot be added back until the app is available from the Mac App Store.
For all intents and purposes, the app seems identical to v.0.8.0 and requires OS X 10.8.1.
We’re pretty big fans of Tweetbot here on DailySocial and this whole situation with Twitter just doesn’t sit right with us. The recent changes to Twitter’s terms for third party developers is pretty damning so when Tapbots decided to go ahead with Tweetbot for Mac, we figured we might as well enjoy it while it lasts because it’s not gonna be for long. Sure, the Tapbots team announced that it is staying the course, but Twitter’s token limit on app users forced Tapbots to pull the app until they can start selling it on the Mac App Store. Somehow it seems that Tapbots might as well prepare a backup plan to alter the app to deliver streams from several different sources, not just from Twitter.
