Why are big platforms shutting down third-party Apps? Should an average user be worried? - eviltoast

With the recent Reddit stuff and YouTube stuff, I realized I’ve been using numerous third party apps or services. The question I have is why the decision and how such decisions would really benefit the company. As an random user, should I be worried about it or even go back to the official Apps just in case the third-party apps would be shut down in the future?

  • inspxtr@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    From my understanding, it’s probably multiple factors, including pushing users back to their app so they can track more and server more apps (3rd party apps usually block apps). Another is de-freeing the API access, which effectively kills many 3rd party apps in reddit case. The charge for API access is possibly very tied to the rise of data scraping demands for training AI models, and reddit has a lot of good content.