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Comment by fishywang | Hacker News Reader

>Twitter subsidized someone else’s paid app, that didn’t show any of Twitter’s ads, for free, for years.

That's one way to put it. The other side is those third-party apps brought Twitter users for years.

How? Can you even sign up in third-party apps? Those third-party app users were already Twitter users before. Maybe you meant they wouldn't remain Twitter users because they can't tolerate the default app experience?

Is it impossibly surprising that someone might only bother to use the normal app for the purpose of signing up for the service so they can use another app they heard of? Think of recent versions of Internet Explorer: "what is my purpose?" "you install Chrome." (But, yeah: I'd say that it isn't even quite about maintaining the user but the extent to which they continue to engage; like, the user might still be a user, but are they someone who spends the entire day using the app? A number of these alternative clients were what were being used by teams of people to be able to manage the really complex/important accounts.)

Before twitter apps (note that twitter didn’t have a first party one for a long time; the early stuff was all third party), I barely used twitter; after I used it all the time.

I’d already kicked the habit (or rather replaced one addiction with another and moved to mastodon) after the purge of the journalists, but if I hadn’t this would be the end of twitter for me; the first party stuff is borderline unusable.

I suspect Saint Car has misunderstood how dependent power users are on the third party apps.

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