Twitter suspends UberTwitter and Twidroyd for policy violations, both should be back soon

If you use Twitter on a BlackBerry or Android device, chances are you’ve used or heard of UberTwitter and Twidroyd. Both are popular clients on their respective platforms, and today both were suspended from accessing Twitter.

Twitter has suspended both apps from using the Twitter API for policy violations. Twitter apparently does this regularly, to the point of suspending hundreds of apps every day. Those apps typically have small user bases, much smaller than the two UberMedia apps. Twitter, in fact, only shared the information because of the number of users who use the apps. When the apps were suspended Twitter recommended that users use the official Twitter apps for their platforms.

What Twitter didn’t say was what policies the UberMedia apps actually violated. Well, thanks to Quora and UberMedia CEO Bill Gross we now know. One of the violations has to do with user privacy. Both clients used tmi.me to allow for longer DMs, but Twitter didn’t like the fact that those DMs could be viewable by anyone on the website. A reasonable concern, and one that’s been fixed. The second was a worry of Twitter’s that UberMedia had some sort of affiliate program with the URL shortening in the apps. In response Ubermedia removed automatic link shorteners from both apps. The last has to do with UberTwitter’s name. So, UberMedia decided the app will now be called UberSocial so as to avoid any conflict.

Gross claims that Twitter will reinstate both apps once the policy violations were fixed. That seems to have happened. As of this writing the apps aren’t yet working, but might be by the time you read this.

Read [Twitter] and [Quora]