

Extend Falcon Pro's Token limit - signed0
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/extend-falcon-pro/

======
tatsuke95
Economics 101: If you know that there is a limit to the number of customers
you can support, why not scale the price the price up as demand for your
product increases to curb that demand? You get to ensure that those who value
the product the most get it. It seems like an interesting model to try in such
circumstances.

I zipped over to the page, and Falcon Pro for Android is a buck, with the
following message:

"And Please RELEASE your access token from the Twitter settings on the web if
you're not using the app anymore."

Sorry, but if I bought it I own it. If this isn't a lesson on "Don't
undervalue your product", I don't know what is.

~~~
wereHamster
Does that mean we should all thank Twitter for creating this scarcity so we
can charge more for our products?

~~~
tatsuke95
It's not ideal, but those are the rules of the game. Optimize with these
constraints, don't hope that doing or charging what others do will work. It's
pretty clear to me that this product is worth more than a buck, and I don't
even know what it does.

There's nothing to feel sorry over in this case. These guys were _blessed_
(non-denominationally, of course) with a product that people want, and aren't
able to capture the value in it. _That's what running a business is all
about._ The product is only one (albeit large) component.

And this isn't irreparable. If too many customers breaks you, you're in the
wrong business.

~~~
lnanek2
A lot of times that will mean not surviving in this case. It's rare that
people will pay much for an app. Most apps are free just so they can get more
downloads as it is.

------
nemof
I'm not sure what authors thought would happen when their apps hit this wall.
Twitter has no reason to listen or help provide a living for these authors. I
think it was an asinine thing of twitter to do, but also shows the fragility
of relying on a third party API for your business.

Also, the author should withdraw their app from the play market now, otherwise
they're going to end up with an awful lot of sales for an app that can no
longer be used being bought by people who have no understanding as to what a
token limit is.

~~~
lambast
What if they sold their code to a different entity, which would rebrand the
app and use a different token? Marketing issues aside, wouldn't it buy them
slots for 100k new users?

~~~
kybernetyk
Or they could release version 2.0 as a separate app.

But then again: It's all speculation because we don't know how Twitter would
handle those cases. And being at the mercy of another company is a really
terrible position to be in.

------
rubbingalcohol
Twitter has already made it clear that they don't want third party clients on
their platform. They didn't budge for Tweetbot, why would they budge for
Falcon Pro? On the one hand, that's just an inherent risk to writing apps that
rely on third party platforms. On the other, Twitter's behavior has been very
shady around this whole matter, especially having once allowed third party
clients. For a company that is so forward-looking in many ways, this type of
behavior is a real step backward.

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bookwormAT
If a service limits how you can access it, and you don't want that: Don't
complain or start a petition. Instead, use or build another service.

~~~
thirsteh
So instead of getting the API limit raised, you should start another Twitter?
Really?

~~~
grey-area
Someone's already done that, all you have to do is use it (maybe as well as
twitter if you want):

<https://app.net/>

<https://tent.io/>

Here's why you shouldn't depend on Twitter or other closed platforms long
term: <http://daltoncaldwell.com/what-twitter-could-have-been>

~~~
mehrzad
Just saying, Tent is great. Good community, great third party developer
support, and though for now it's just a Rails app you can run on your server,
it's going to be something more abstract like IRC. The co-founders also really
know their stuff.

~~~
Titanous
I'm one of the Tent architects. Thanks for the kind words :)

Tent is actually a protocol, so anyone can implement their own server. We
don't use Rails, but we do have reference server implementation called tentd
that is written in Ruby: <https://github.com/tent/tentd>

------
PanMan
I came here to say they should have charged for the app. But I just checked,
and they do: It's not a free app, but one that costs $1.

~~~
1880
The problem is it has 40k active installs but around 60k tokens taken up by
pirating the app.

[http://androidspin.com/2013/02/23/falcon-pro-for-twitter-
rea...](http://androidspin.com/2013/02/23/falcon-pro-for-twitter-
reaches-100k-token-limit-time-to-rebel/)

~~~
PanMan
There they refer to "active installs". Its still possible they sold 100K apps,
everybody tried it (used a token), and 60K people deleted the app again. Those
people then didn't reject their token in Twitter's app setting (which almost
nobody does).

If it were indeed 60K pirates, that would really suck.

~~~
Onelow
Don't forget that logging in with multiple accounts on the same install also
uses a token per account.

------
joeblau
One thing you could do is petition the users that aren't using the app to
revoke access to twitter which would free up some seats. This would be tough
though since your uusers paid for the app and could potentially lose a seat in
the future. That's the approach that Tapbots took with TweetBot for Mac:
[http://tapbots.com/blog/news/where-did-the-tweetbot-for-
mac-...](http://tapbots.com/blog/news/where-did-the-tweetbot-for-mac-alpha-go)

------
nwh
TweetBot must be nearing that limit too.

~~~
kmfrk
Their limit is twice their number of users/tokens at the time of the official
announcement, since they had more than 100k users at that time. They'll hit it
eventually, but it'll probably take some time.

Their OS X client only goes up to 100k, I imagine, though.

~~~
nwh
A tweet from the developer suggested that both apps ate out of the same pool.
I could be recalling incorrectly though, as I can't find it now.

~~~
kmfrk
That sounds insane if true. Unfortunately, not implausible coming from
Twitter.

~~~
nwh
I was incorrect.

> These tokens dictate how many users Tweetbot for Mac can have. The app’s
> limit is separate from, but much smaller than, the limit for Tweetbot for
> iOS. Once we use up the tokens granted to us by Twitter, we will no longer
> be able to sell the app to new users.

From: <http://tapbots.com/blog/news/tweetbot-mac>

------
signed0
via: <https://twitter.com/falcon_android/status/305276990183854080>

