If you want a refund for the remaining subscription time, simplyĭo nothing. Third is the option for a prorated refund: Years and don’t need us to send you a prorated refund back, you If you’ve been happy with the service we’ve provided over the Second, Tweetbot offers an “I am happy with what I got out of Tweetbot and do not need a refund” option, with a button labelled “I Don’t Need a Refund” and this text: (Any Tweetbot subscriber who has not yet moved to Mastodon should do it - it’s like the early fun Twitter of yore over there, perhaps even better, and Ivory feels like home to a Tweetbot junkie, trust me.) Any Tweetbot subscriber who has moved to Mastodon should tap this button immediately. The first is an option to transfer your existing Tweetbot subscription to Ivory, Tapbots’s magnificent (and magnificently Tweetbot-like) new Mastodon client. Magnificent work for a dreary task, presented in good cheer. 2 Also, unsurprisingly, both of their designs are utterly beautiful and perfectly on point for their distinctive respective brands. Their messaging and offers are similar and obviously coordinated. Both apps, upon launch, now simply display a single screen describing what has happened, and offer options to users with existing subscriptions. This week, both Tapbots and The Iconfactory released updates in the iOS App Store to Tweetbot and Twitterrific - not to restore any functionality, but to deal with the grim meathook reality of these paid-for subscriptions rendered useless by Phony Stark’s imperious shitheadedness. But they don’t just show up in the middle of the night, mid-lease, and change the locks or bulldoze the building. When a landlord decides to sell or repurpose a rental property, they give tenants notice that their leases won’t be renewed, months in advance. A proper sunset period would have allowed such third-party partners - and developers like Tapbots and The Iconfactory were indeed partners of Twitter 1 - to stop accepting new subscriptions and renewals, and allow existing subscribers to run out the clock with service for the period they already paid for. I can’t recall a situation like this, with an ecosystem of third-party clients collecting subscriptions and then having the first-party service yank the carpet out from under them - and their customers - with zero warning or sunset period. That’s where Tapbots and The Iconfactory are. 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. Consider the gut punch of losing your job - you stop earning income. 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. But you don’t need access to Tapbots’s sales figures to surmise that Tweetbot was the company’s sole tentpole. Tapbots does too - Calcbot (a calculator and unit converter for both iOS and Mac) and Pastebot (my personal favorite clipboard history utility for Mac - I’ve been using it for years now). As I mentioned last month, The Iconfactory has a bunch of other great commercial apps (and games). Twitterrific and Tweetbot weren’t side projects - they were flagship products from small companies. It’s more of an “ Oh shit, we’re fucked” situation. That left each company with thousands and thousands of customers with months left on those subscriptions, but no functionality.įinancially, this isn’t a “ Huh, yeah, that must kinda suck” situation. A less obvious but no less serious problem is that the leading clients, Tapbots’s Tweetbot and The Iconfactory’s Twitterrific, were monetized through annual subscriptions. The obvious problem for developers of such clients, of course, is that Twitter clients are useless without the ability to connect to Twitter. Twitter didn’t even make it official that third-party clients had been banned until a week of confusion and dread had passed. You surely recall that last month, in a fit of pique, Elon Musk spitefully pulled the plug on third-party Twitter clients with no notice whatsoever, in the most chickenshit way imaginable. Feel good and go buy yourself a treat, knowing you helped the good folks at a small company whose work you’ve appreciated (and will continue to).Tap the “I Don’t Need a Refund” button.Reinstall the app if you’ve already deleted it otherwise, make sure you’re running the latest version.Long story short: If you’re a subscriber to either Tweetbot or Twitterrific, you can help them out with three simple steps: Tweetbot and Twitterrific Face the Cliff Wednesday, 1 March 2023
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