Obviously you can try to obscure that you are scraping, but that is difficult to get right and there is no way back once you get it wrong.
The requirement for the extension/plug-in has to be that: it looks like someone uses Twitter normally.
Twitter WebUI loads images and videos when you scroll. Which means you have a good signal what image and video is associated with what tweet.
1) the law, at least in the US. Laws such as copyright and maybe even the CFAA have been abused to outlaw adversarial interoperability. You'd need to either practice good opsec and operate anonymously or be based out of reach of US-allied law enforcement.
2) Apple (and maybe Google too?) - they will remove any client for a third-party service unless said client has explicit approval from the third-party, all the way up to ridiculous levels such as rejecting an app using the LAN API of smart home devices explicitly designed for this purpose: https://community.lifx.com/t/app-store-rejection-permission-...
As for the APIs being copyrightable see Google vs Oracle.
I hear this sentiment quite often on HN. Maybe I’m missing something but was this tacked onto the end of those stone tablets that Moses brought down from the mountain?
If not, then it seems like people want this to be a statement of fact when the reality is much closer to:
> If I buy an iPhone I wish I could run whatever app I want on it.
> The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. And so, you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. And guess what? There’s no SDK that you need! You’ve got everything you need if you know how to write apps using the most modern web standards to write amazing apps for the iPhone today..
https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-...
I'm also not in the habit of crying about what was said 15 years ago and what has clearly changed since then.
Once you have any entity having control over your device, even if it is for your own benefit and you completely trust that entity, a whole bunch of other competing business considerations come into play. In the case of adversarial interoperability, that means business risks that Apple doesn't want to take on. Let's say that tomorrow Elon Musk goes absolutely insane[2] and decides that third-party Twitter clients are hacking as defined by the CFAA. If Apple knowingly distributes those clients, then they could be held criminally liable for signing and distributing the app.
Less dramatically, adversarial operability implies a lot of support headaches. Apple wants to sell working software, not stuff that needs updates every few hours to keep ahead of updates done on Twitter's side to kill it. Even if they wanted to fight for adversarial interop in court, the underlying constraint of "pre-approve software updates to keep malware away" makes updating the software in real time to work around Twitter's workaround to the software untenable.
For a non-Apple, pre-everything-being-locked-down example of how much of a pain adversarial interoperability is in practice, there's the time Microsoft tried to make MSN speak to AIM. They stopped once AOL started using buffer overflow exploits to validate that you were running AIM[3]. AOL did not need to actually sue Microsoft with a spurious application of the CFAA. They just needed to wrap their API and client in enough garbage to make interop monetarily painful to support.
[0] In the Cory Doctorow sense
[1] AI safety term for "thing you need to do to get to other things you want".
[2] More than he already has
The truth is that the App Store lock-in is about securing Apple's moneyhose, and user "security" is an afterthought.
But there's no excuse that their OS can't sandbox apps as best it can to prevent issues like this. Sure there will still be scam apps, but it should be a lot easier to install apps from outside of an app store.
It's just a blatant money grab otherwise; Spotify for example is extremely trusted and unlikely to be malware - why can't they have an "install" button on their site to install their app? Because companies that run the app stores want a cut.
Why aren't mobile OS' more like desktop OS'? Everyone acts like it's about security but then we get things like Pegasus and Google's Project Zero which is constantly finding stuff anyway.
Even now the granularity on permissions and the main problem of user apathy towards this stuff are solvable. I'm on Android and I still don't understand why an app can only ask for gallery permission/access to all files and why I'm not able to only grant it read access to a particular folder in a streamlined way.
All of this stuff should be designed around a user's intentions.
A phone is no different from a laptop, except that it is smaller and the mouse/keyboard are part of the screen. On my phone, I should be able to:
* Open an IDE and write some code.
* Compile my code (depending on the language).
* Run my code.
The whole concept of "app stores" is absurd. In 10 years, will we be denied sudo rights on our laptops? Will we need to pay a 30% cut to Apple for every program that we install, plus $99/yr if we want the privilege of building code for our own device?
More and more likely. In 10 years' time I'd love to be off the Intel/Apple Mx train and using devices that can run desktop Linux with with RISC-V and Raspberry PI-like SoCs.
If it could only also serve as a smartphone I'd have one already.
These are unique platforms with unique properties in their design. You value them or you don't. Nobody's forcing you to use them for general purpose computing and there are thousands upon thousands of BRAND NEW general purpose computing products with zero restrictions produced every year. People in this thread are being drama queens.
«Macs will stay Macs the way you know and love them. They will run the same powerful Pro apps. They will offer the same developer APIs Macs have today. They will let users create multiple volumes on disks with different operating system versions and they will let users boot from external drives. They will support drivers for peripherals and they will be amazing UNIX machines for developers and the scientific community that can run any software they like.»
Apple might not be such a big issue because they allow reader apps. I guess they can ban you to improve their relationship with Twitter but you can also throw a subscription service as an IAP to improve your odds :)
On two, it seems like they are concerned with trademark to me. A workaround could be making a website that parses and displays Twitter content and call it something else. Then, in an app, make no mention of Twitter and only the website.
2) You can use another company's marks, names, etc. to indicate your product works with their product. You have to follow some guidelines.
You can find it here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mastodon-chirper/l...
Perhaps it should be handled in the same way the YouTubeDL (YT DLP) team handles changes in the html.
I wonder if Twitter can be killed by the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy?
So:
1. Make a client that combines Mastadon/Others and Twitter feeds, making it switching out of Twitter frictionless.
2. Provide extra functionality for non-Twitter posts, encouraging the use of the non-Twitter services.
3. Once have a good traction, penalize Twitter post to further push non-Twitter adoption. Eventually remove Twitter support completely.
4. Profit??