If you use Twitter on Android, chances are that you’ve heard of Falcon Widget and the sister app, Falcon Pro. Falcon Pro was one of our Highly Recommended applications in the Coolsmartphone 2012 Awards and with good reason – it boasts a wide variety of features and an excellent, intuitive UI.
However, with Twitter API v1.1, the company introduced a 100,000 user token limit for 3rd party client apps like Falcon Pro. This gives Twitter tighter control on how their API is used by others. Unfortunately, it also poses problems for developers like Joaquim Vergès, the Falcon Pro developer who has been continually improving the Falcon Pro experience for the past few months.
If Falcon Pro had hit the 100k user token limit in a legitimate manner, I daresay he would have been pretty happy. It sells for 64p here in the UK, meaning that it would net him a cool total of £64,000, which is excellent for under three months work. However, that isn’t the case – only 40,000 of his users actually paid for the app.
Now, Falcon Pro doesn’t support multiple user accounts because of the API limits outlined above – meaning that either a) his users are using different Twitter accounts on different devices linked up to the same Google Play Store account on a massive scale (unlikely, as I understand that one user account = one token regardless of the number of devices it is used on), or b) there could well be more users of his app that pirated it than actually purchased it.
That seems rather pathetic, really, considering that the app costs 64p, or roughly 1/373 of the price of a Nexus 4 here in the UK. I understand that some people may not have a credit card linked up to their Play Store account, but come on – it’s a Twitter client, there are many, many alternatives.
It’s issues like this that make apps like Falcon Pro a rarity – exceptional quality Android-first releases. It brings me back to something Jamie Ryan, an ex-writer here at Coolsmartphone, asked on Twitter a couple of weeks back – are there any high-profile cross-platform releases that came to Android first, rather than iOS? We couldn’t find any then and cases like this could be the reason why.
Joaquim Vergès has created a petition to increase the number of auth tokens allocated to Falcon Pro and I’d recommend signing it – time will tell if it is successful. You can sign the petition here.
