Twitter Inc. today announced a number of major updates for its developer platform that the company said would encourage developer innovation.

Developers can now get started more easily with the introduction of two new developer account access levels that provide more data for free. The levels are called Essential access and Elevated access.

With Essential access, developers gain free, immediate access to the new version 2 of Twitter’s application programming interface, one app environment and 500,000 tweets per month. The objective of this level of access is to provide developers with a test environment to work in.

Elevated access is a new free level that includes three app environments — development, staging and production — and 2 million tweets per month. Developers already using Twitter API v2 will automatically have their projects upgraded to Elevated. Otherwise, they will need to apply for it.

Twitter has also updated its developer policy so that it no longer restricts how developers build with Twitter’s core features or limits the number of users developers can support through their apps. That way developers can do a lot more with their apps and tools using the platform.

Twitter API v2 becomes primary

Alongside all of today’s updates, the Twitter API v2, which was introduced last year, has become the primary Twitter API.

The API v2 was rebuilt from the ground up and designed to be cleaner and easier to use. It also adds new developer features such as the ability to specify which fields get returned or retrieve more tweets from a conversation.

Over the past few months, Twitter has made the API v2 the focus for new features and endpoints, including endpoints for Spaces, polls on tweets and pinning and unpinning Lists. Now that v2 is the primary API, further endpoints for Twitter products in development will continue to be added.

Almost all existing apps can be fully supported on v2, so migration should be painless for most.

Twitter said that though the API v1.1 will remain available, it will be supported only for critical bug fixes so that apps and tools that use it do not break. The Twitter team will continue to support developers using the Premium and Enterprise v1.1 APIs and work to assist with transitioning to API v2 in the future.

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