As reported on this site last week, Twitter continues to dick around developers, under the guise of consistency. They want third-party clients gone, because, according to Ryan Sarver, who heads up Twitter’s platform team:

With more people joining Twitter and accessing the service in multiple ways, a consistent user experience is more crucial than ever.

Cunningly, rather than just block API access, Twitter’s instead making the user experience for third-party clients increasingly shit. This time, they’re blocking access to DMs unless a client enables you to brave the hideous OAuth sign-in that current Twitter-for-Mac and iOS dev Loren Brichter happily rubbished a couple of years ago. (In case you’re wondering, no, OAuth hasn’t gotten any better since.)

Steve Lyb decided to put the consistency claim to the test, checking out the Mac, iPhone and iPad clients, to see just how similar they all are. (Spoiler: they aren’t.) Lyb also pre-empts anyone bleating that of course the apps aren’t going to be the same, because they’re running on different systems (computer, tablet, smartphone):

It is unacceptable, despite this, to account for the discrepancies when it comes to features and functionality. Design is one thing, obviously: there are some choices to be made based on the type of device being used. You can’t make Twitter for iPhone look entirely like the Mac and iPad versions, but that’s no excuse for the amount of visual inconsistencies found between versions.

What you can do is make them act the same before making yourselves out to look like complete hypocritical fools to the people who turned your platform from nothing into something substantial, and great.

Frankly, I’m not sure Twitter cares any more, and, increasingly, neither will its users. When Favoured Client A starts playing up, they’ll move to the official Twitter one, even if it isn’t as good—and most won’t go back, because something that works is better than something that’s broken. But web users are fickle, and Twitter doesn’t do anything really special. With Facebook embracing devs, it’d only take that service to sort out its crap feeds and to encourage a few enterprising developers to make stripped-down feed-oriented clients to wipe Twitter off the face of the earth.