It is a bittersweet week for fans of Talon for Twitter from Klinker Apps, who also develops EvolveSMS and Blur Launcher. The developer has just released Talon for Twitter (Plus), a new and improved version of the popular Twitter client, but one that has been designed for Android 5.0 and with Material Design in mind. But sadly, that also marked the death of the Classic version of Talon that works on other Android versions, due to Twitter‘s rather restrictive authorization token limit.
A bit of the good news first. Talon for Twitter is now ready for Android Lollipop, complete with all the trappings of Material Design, including butter smooth animations, bold colors, and speed. The developers note that since Android 5.0 is still a moving target, expect some changes along the way, but hopefully nothing drastic or unfavorable. The app is priced at $3.99 and, unfortunately works only with Android 5.0.
The sad news is that the older version of the app has been removed from Google Play Store. The reason is that Talon for Twitter Classic has reached Twitter’s token limit. To artificially drive people to use its official apps instead, Twitter allots only 100,000 authorization tokens to third-party apps, limiting the total number of users that can link their Twitter accounts to the app. So, quite ironically, the more popular an app is, the faster it runs out of tokens. That is exactly what happened to Talon the other day and Klinker Apps decided to remove the app from Google Play Store listing so that new users will no longer be able to buy it, thinking they can still use the app.
The story, fortunately, ends on a happy note. Two in fact. While Talon Classic is gone from Google Play Store, those who have bought the app before will still be able to see it in their Downloaded apps list (or from this link) and install it as normal. The developers will even provide updates to those as well. It will only be new users who will no longer be able to find it or install it from Google Play Store. But more than that, as promised, Klinker Apps will open source Talon for Twitter Classic soon, making it possible not only to build the app yourself, provided you have the tools, of course, but also to learn from this highly successful app’s source code to build your own apps in the future.
