On our struggle with Twitter’s hostility towards independent developers

Dear friends!

As you may already know, Linkis is being suspended by Twitter since 12 of May 2017. Our application is one of the most popular among independent apps on Twitter – just before the suspension, we had over 2 millions registered users and 800K+ active users, working with Linkis. And like any other developer, we did our best to fulfill any requirements Twitter had.

Nevertheless, Linkis was suspended for reasons we consider unclear.

After more than two months struggle, we have to admit that Twitter’s policy had become no less than hostile towards the independent developers. We’ve come to this conclusion seeing that while we were desperately trying to reach anyone from Twitter Team, they’d decided only to ignore us.

We can easily prove that Linkis app was banned due to apparent misunderstanding. Three arguments Twitter made in a single unsatisfactory letter are wrong and have nothing to do with reality. And while we are ready to discuss this issue and seek for compromises and solutions, Twitter is unwilling to talk to us.

During these two months, our team and loyal users who care (and we can’t thank everybody enough for supporting us) did our best to reach Twitter Administration. We wrote numerous letters, contacted likely every Twitter manager possible including the Head of Twitter Platform Team Mr. Andy Piper. All of them preferred to redirect us to Twitter Policy Team, without providing us with any help or advice.

Same goes for the questions left by our users – Twitter Policy Team simply decided to ignore not only us but hundreds of tweets left by our users. We think that says a lot about Twitter and their ethics towards independent developers (and users).

At the moment we see the situation as follows: someone within the Twitter Team made a huge mistake, but instead of acknowledging that fact and fixing it within few hours Twitter decided to abuse its authority and now wants whole situation and Linkis gone.

Despite Twitter’s hostile policy and silent treatment, we will continuously try to reach someone within Twitter. Until then, all the users willing to work with Linkis can use it manually, logging in via Facebook.

Unfortunately, for now, we have to postpone further development as we simply can’t do anything until the current situation is resolved and the app is back on Twitter. Linkis app remains inoperative, and we are sorry for that.

We kindly ask everyone to continue helping us in reaching Twitter and establishing the dialogue between our teams. Together we can resolve that and #RestoreLinkis once and for all!

PS: Once again we want to thank every single one of you who sent tweets and continue to support us through this difficult time.