Twitter wants to give you access to the data. Their client is their main product. Thus, every 3rd party client is competing with their main product, that seems to be a fact.
Theres no way to stop you from building one anyway, twitter knows that. If you go against their rules, you're a revolutionary, and if you win that revolution, they'll have to deal with you.
You can't expect however, that the incumbent is going to go around encouraging revolutions against themselves.
The only alternative is to encourage everyone to make clients, at which point, they're just a big cloud xmpp server to the world.
Perhaps there is a class of people who pay for email apps. I'm not one of them. I don't see twitter as a platform, or at least don't use it as one. It is a communication medium which, for all my usage, could have no developer ecosystem.
Professionally I would love to have free access to the Firehose, that's some juicy data. But as a consumer Twitter 'apps' are no more worth my money than email apps.
Theres no way to stop you from building one anyway, twitter knows that. If you go against their rules, you're a revolutionary, and if you win that revolution, they'll have to deal with you.
You can't expect however, that the incumbent is going to go around encouraging revolutions against themselves.
The only alternative is to encourage everyone to make clients, at which point, they're just a big cloud xmpp server to the world.