[Updated] Bitter about better apps, Twitter suspends UberTwitter and Twidroyd

What better way to force people to use your in-house app than to block your two biggest competing apps? Before even providing an explanation, Twitter whores out links to its official Twitter app for Android, iOS, and BlackBerry as an alternative to the now-suspended UberTwitter and Twidroyd. Twitter recently updated all of its official apps on the three platforms to make them more on par with each other and give them all the feel and functionality of the wildly popular iOS version. I used the official Twitter app for iOS back when I had an iPhone because I loved Tweetie 2. When I flipped to Android, I tested out a bunch of apps and settled with Twidroyd because it was the most comprehensive of them all and had the most features and most ways to customize it to your liking. Even when Twitter released its updated app for Android I gave it the benefit of the doubt and took it for a test run. Although it was nice, it still was lacking in many ways…ways that were already part of Twidroyd’s functionality. Twidroyd was clearly the better overall client on the Android. Twidroyd recently released version 5.0 adding a bunch of new UI features as well as support for some new URL shorteners and in-line support for yfrog and Instagram. Apparently the recent changes somehow violate Twitter’s policies (aka, they bruise its official app’s ego) so if you’re using the wildly popular and successful Twidroyd or UberTwitter apps, they’ve just become a memory paperweight on your device. ETA on when they’ll be up and running, if they’ll be up and running again, is unknown.

[UPDATE] A Twitter spokesperson commented saying “These violations include, but aren’t limited to, a privacy issue with private Direct Messages longer than 140 characters, trademark infringement, and changing the content of users’ Tweets in order to make money.” Full statement after the break.

We ask all developers in the Twitter ecosystem to abide by a simple set of rules that are in the interests of our users, as well as the health and vitality of the platform as a whole.

We often take actions to enforce these rules; in fact, on an average day we turn off more than one hundred services that violate our API rules of the road. This keeps the ecosystem fair for everyone.

Today we suspended several applications, including UberTwitter, twidroyd and UberCurrent, which have violated Twitter policies and trademarks in a variety of ways. These violations include, but aren’t limited to, a privacy issue with private Direct Messages longer than 140 characters, trademark infringement, and changing the content of users’ Tweets in order to make money.

We’ve had conversations with UberMedia, the developer of these applications, about policy violations since April 2010, when they first launched under the name TweetUp – a term commonly used by Twitter users and a trademark violation. We continue to be in contact with UberMedia and hope that they will bring the suspended applications into compliance with our policies soon.