New Twitter API changes will bring Like and Block data to third-party apps

iMore's Twitter in Tweetbot on iPhone 11 Pro
iMore's Twitter in Tweetbot on iPhone 11 Pro (Image credit: Christine Romero-Chan / iMore)

What you need to know

  • Twitter has announced API changes that will give third-party apps access to more data.
  • Like and Block data will be available to third-party Twitter apps.

Twitter has announced changes to its API that will allow third-party apps to access data about likes and clocks. The change was announced via the Twitter developer forums.

The biggest change comes in the form of Likes, with apps set to be able to access data including who likes a specific tweet. That's something that's limited to the official Twitter app right now.

Liking Tweets is one of the core features people use to engage in the public conversation on Twitter. With endpoints in our Likes lookup endpoint group, you can see a list of accounts that have liked a specified Tweet, or which Tweets a specified account has liked. You could use these endpoints to understand what kind of content a specified account or group of accounts Likes, or study how information spreads across Twitter.

It's a similar story with Blocks. Twitter says apps will be able to see the accounts that an individual user has blocked.

Blocking users is a core security feature on Twitter. Using blocks lookup, you can see who you or an authenticated user has blocked. This can be useful for determining how you interact with a given account.

The API changes will likely need developers to make changes to their apps in order to add these features, but that is something we can hope happens sooner rather than later. Some of us just can't get along with Twitter.app, and this latest news is a welcome expansion of an API that was once very limiting indeed.

Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.