Instagram used to have a wide open API that allowed you to do every single thing except post. There were many apps and websites that made use of it in interesting ways. But then it was acquired by Facebook.
Twitter API is now also very much closed, deliberately incomplete, and requires staff approval before you can do anything at all.
Closing down the public API, or at least nerfing it enough to make third-party clients frustrating to use, is the common theme among all social media services that have the business model of eyeball-raping their users. If such a service would have a public API that's enough to build a third-party client, everyone will be using third-party clients, that would of course be much better than the official ones since they're not optimized for those stupid metrics, and thus not seeing ads, not participating in A/B tests for button colors and not sending the Very Important™ analytics.
Twitter API is now also very much closed, deliberately incomplete, and requires staff approval before you can do anything at all.
Closing down the public API, or at least nerfing it enough to make third-party clients frustrating to use, is the common theme among all social media services that have the business model of eyeball-raping their users. If such a service would have a public API that's enough to build a third-party client, everyone will be using third-party clients, that would of course be much better than the official ones since they're not optimized for those stupid metrics, and thus not seeing ads, not participating in A/B tests for button colors and not sending the Very Important™ analytics.