Falcon Pro

» see getfalcon.pro as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

For a stretch of 2013 the price of Falcon Pro in the Google Play Store was $132.13, and the price was there to stop you buying it. The listing above it read TOKEN LIMIT REACHED, DO NOT BUY, WORKS ONLY FOR EXISTING USERS, in capitals. A developer had put a hundred euros on his own app because the alternative was letting one more person install something that would not work.

Falcon Pro went on sale on 1 December 2012 at a dollar and was immediately treated as the best Twitter client on Android, which was a real category then and a contested one. Joaquim Vergès wrote it by himself. The reviews in that first month are about the animations and the widget, and none of them mention the thing that was going to kill it, because at that point nobody had run into it.

In August 2012 Twitter had rewritten its developer terms. Any new third-party client was allowed a hundred thousand user tokens, and that was the whole allowance, forever. Not a hundred thousand at a time, not a hundred thousand a year. A hundred thousand people, and after that the app stops being able to sign anyone in. Falcon Pro hit the wall on 23 February 2013, twelve weeks after launch, and it hit it faster than the download count suggests because the app supported multiple accounts and each account burned a token. Around 32,000 buyers of the latest version had consumed roughly three and a third tokens each.

I did not buy this app and I have no memory of it. What I recognize is the shape of the problem, which every engineer who has ever built on top of somebody else's platform recognizes at a glance. The ceiling was not a bug and it was not a resource constraint. Twitter simply decided how many people were allowed to use software it had not written, wrote the number down, and refused to move it when asked. Vergès petitioned for more tokens and was told no, with no public reason given.

~ the case file ~

~ the hundred thousand ~

The cap was aimed at a category rather than at any one app. Twitter spent 2012 and 2013 taking back the front door: the timeline had to look the way Twitter wanted it to look, because that is where the advertising was going to live, and a third-party client is a version of your product with your revenue model removed. The token limit did not ban anything. It let a client exist, become popular, and then quietly stop being able to accept a new user, which produces the same outcome with none of the announcement.

What made it strange in practice was that the count only went up. A user who uninstalled the app did not give the token back unless the developer went and revoked it, so an app could be at its ceiling while its actual live user count was far below. Vergès reset the whole token pool twice, which logged out every existing user and made them sign in again, and each reset bought a few weeks.

~ the protest price ~

The 132 dollars was a euro figure, 100, converted. He put it up on 26 February and it stayed there while a petition asking Twitter for a larger allowance collected signatures, and the whole thing was covered as an act of protest, which it partly was. It was also just accurate. There was nothing left to sell, so the price went to a number that reads as a closed sign.

The second reset in June was where it ended. He generated fresh application keys while the old ones from the previous version were still live, which meant one app was running on multiple key sets, and that is against the API terms whatever the intention behind it. On 19 June 2013 the keys stopped working, new sign-ins failed on version 2.0.3, and he unpublished the app from the Play Store himself while working out what to do. He told people it would not be allowed to die.

~ what the cap taught ~

It came back in January 2015 as Falcon Pro 3, rewritten from nothing and shipping with an instruction that no consumer app in 2012 could have printed with a straight face: register your own application with Twitter, generate your own key, and paste it into the client. Every user became their own developer with their own private allowance of a hundred thousand, which nobody would ever exhaust alone. The ceiling had turned a consumer app into a kit.

Vergès joined Twitter's Android team later that year and worked on the official client, which is either an ending or a punchline depending on the day. Falcon Pro 3 is gone too, the site 404s, and in February 2023 Twitter closed off third-party clients entirely and every survivor in the category went out together. The cap in 2013 was the first move of that, and it was legible as such at the time. Building on an API means the ceiling belongs to somebody else, and they can lower it while you are standing under it.

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