Instagram does not want to fall into the same Facebook mistake and has restricted the access that third-party apps access to users’ accounts, resulting in fatal consequences to the payment app ecosystem.
Instagram has limited API to prevent a scandal like Cambridge Analytica
That is not something that Facebook wants to repeat in Cambridge Analytica, and even worse in the new network: Instagram. For this reason, the photographic social network has cut access to its API to a good number of third-party applications to prevent access to users, and to those that allow them to interact with the network, has reduced the number of accesses they can make per user an hour.
It is a significant move as it reduces at a stroke the market for third-party services that had been created around the social network, reducing the exposure of users to these applications (although it is the user who at all times authorizes third-party apps to access the account), and at the same time substantially limiting access to user data that until now had these applications. Fewer apps and less data.
Now legitimate app developers have gone to war with the social network, and for a straightforward reason. Instagram has limited access to the API unannounced to developers, preventing them from updating their applications in time to meet new specifications and limiting API calls.
We’ll see what’s left of it, but there are subscription-based analytics applications that charge up to $5 a month to their users, who have lost most of their data access at the stroke of a pen and have stopped serving their users. In short, a slow and silent death for this ecosystem that had been created around the social network.