Fenix, the ever so popular third-party Twitter application for Android, has reached its 100,000 user token limit. A tweet sent out in response to a user questioning why they were unable to authorize access to the application confirmed that this was the case earlier on today.
Following the Falcon
You may have heard of another third-party Twitter application called Falcon Pro, which was created by Joaquim Verges. Joaquim is very well respected in the Android community with his brilliantly done apps such as Falcon and Flyne, to name a few. The reason why these applications were highly regarded to Android enthusiasts was its design and core functionality.
Sites such as Droid-Life and Android Central covered the application in-depth and highly recommended this app to anyone on the lookout for a better experience than the official Twitter application could offer. From that point onwards, it could only spell trouble for the prolific Android developer. Twitter changed its rules to ‘newer’ third-party applications in August 2012, with one of the rules being that you can have no more than 100,000 user tokens. It seems like an unreachable goal and not much to worry about from initial reactions, but when an application, in this case Falcon Pro, gets tonnes of media attention, a stampede of thousands of Android users bought the application like it was about to sell out — which – for the most part – it did.
In February 2013, Falcon Pro had reached its 100k token limit, with a plethora of bad feedback surrounding this news that was mainly directed toward Joaquim, which wasn’t his fault. The way the token limit works is quite clear, really: as soon as your application reaches 100,000 users, Twitter will no longer accept any additional users unless the developer contacts Twitter directly for extra tokens, which rarely happens. When it comes to exceptions with the token limit, applications published before August 2012 (when the rule came into play), they will have more tokens (Which I believe is 200,000). If you published your application after August 2012, you’re down to the basic 100k users. As you can see in the image above, if you contact Twitter directly, they will work out a way to add extra tokens, which unfortunately never happened in the case of Joaquim for Falcon Pro.
Falcon Pro is a relatively dead application now, as the shocking news broke in early 2015 that Twitter hired Joaquim Verges to work on its app design. Initially, not many changes were made to the official Twitter application for Android up until recently when the first full redesign of the application leaked for everyone to see. If you’re apart of the Alpha testing group for the app, you can see the overhaul for yourself. But it seems this change is heavily influenced by the former Falcon Pro developer.
What does this mean for Fenix?
There are a couple of workarounds that the Fenix developers can attempt to keep the new users flowing in. One of them is to change the ‘keys’ to the apps internals to make it appear to be a brand new application. This means, unfortunately, that people would have to buy the application again and re-authorise. What you find when it comes to third-party Twitter applications is that people buy it, try it and move on. With this workaround, you get fresh users downloading the app and having plenty of tokens spare, since it has washed out all the people that have tried it and no longer want to use it.
Another way of doing it, which is widely unknown to most people, is to just reset the tokens and don’t re-publish the application. This is what Joaquim did initially when he reached the 100k limit.
For the people that currently have Fenix uninstalled but authorized the app at least once: Don’t panic. The way the tokens work is based on your Twitter account and not per-device. You can install it on as many devices as you so please and not have to deal with token errors.
As of right now, Fenix has been removed from the Play Store for obvious reasons.
What do you think to Twitter’s token limit? Too much? Too little? Do let us know in the comments.
