Tweetro Windows 8 twitter app hits Twitter’s 200K token limit, may need to be pulled

The lack of a native Windows 8 twitter app have lead to huge interest in other 3rd party twitter apps.

One of the beneficiaries of this interest was Tweetro, who had a huge spike of downloads associated with the general release of the OS.

Unfortunately this also meant the company quickly ran through their allocation of 200,000 authorization tokens Twitter currently allocates to third party devs in an effort to force users to their official app, which of course does not exist for Windows 8.

Atta Elayyan, Co-founder of Lazyworm Applications Ltd, who are publishing the app, writes:

The app is now completely crippled and users cannot get past the OAuth screen as they are presented with an error ‘Cannot connect to service’.  We were under the impression that Twitter wasn’t going to enforce the token limits until March next year (when all 3rd party apps are required to migrate to the new API’s) however this doesn’t seem to be the case.
We have reached out to Twitter for confirmation however we haven’t heard back yet.
The future of Tweetro is uncertain at this stage but it’s likely that it will be pulled from the Windows Store until we can figure out the best way moving forward.

Unless Twitter relents and allows Tweetro more tokens, the app may return as paid app funded directly by their maximum of 100,000 users, vs a ad-supported free app supported potentially by an audience of millions.

In the mean time Atta suggests current users not  uninstalling the app, removing accounts from within the app or revoking access from Twitter as there is no method of accessing OAuth and re-authorising the app again.

While Tweetro is clearly a victim of both twitter and their own success, there are many areas not limited in this way, and it seems that developers who get to the Windows Phone store early are likely to have a much greater level of interest and success than those who follow even a few months later.