Question about app-only auth and rate limits for an iOS app in API v1.1

eviansf · 2013-04-16T21:40:36.000Z

Hi- I posted this as a reply on another section (didn’t receive a response yet), but thought it may be important for others to see this, as I haven’t yet seen it directly addressed. And apologies if it has and I didn’t recognize it- this is my first time using the Twitter API and, from the sound of it, a lot of others are also confused, as well.

So, just to clarify, if I want to use app-only auth to access one user’s public Twitter list (using GET list/statuses) on an iOS app with 200 unique users, only 180 of them could make the above request in a 15 minute time period (the rate limit page says 180 requests per 15 minute window)? Thanks.

episod · 2013-04-16T22:00:57.000Z

Missed this the first time around – happy to answer here.

The number of users or “instances of use” of your application are not figured in to rate limits for app-only auth. A method with a limit of 180 requests per 15 minute window is intrinsic to your application, regardless of whether it’s on device A, device B, device C, website 1, website 2.

The best way to allow your end users to access Twitter content in your app is to require them to auth and leverage their access tokens. Otherwise, you may want to think of a centralized setup where your application securely accesses your servers to retrieve data you’ve collected instead.

eviansf · 2013-04-16T23:20:00.000Z

Thanks so much! One last thing- do you happen to know if I could use iOS’s Social framework as a way to perform a user auth (if their Twitter credentials are already stored on their device using ACAccountStore), and thus get access tokens for what I’m trying to do? It’s detailed here: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/ios#Single_Sign-On

episod · 2013-04-17T14:34:22.000Z

Yes, you should be able to do that with the iOS Social framework. If you end up needing the actual access token for the user in the future, we also have [node:2354] available.