Twitter hasn’t exactly had the smoothest of relationships with app developers over the last few months, following last year’s announcement that it would soon introduce stricter rules and regulations for those who build apps linked to the messaging platform.

Last Thursday, Twitter finally expanded upon what it what it meant by ‘tightening up its rules’, although their explanation was pretty confusing.

Michael Sippey, Director of Products for Twitter, said in a blog post that stricter guidelines would now be implemented for developers using its application programming interface (API).

Twitter explained that the reasons for limiting its API were rational from a business sense – with over a million applications said to be integrated with twitter, the costs of connecting with all of these clients runs into millions of dollars, as Twitter employs a legion of engineers specifically to manage them.

Developers are not happy about the changes however. Box Ceo Aaron Levie likened the new rules to those of a communist dictatorship, saying “Twitter’s API has more rules than North Korea”.

He might just have a point. Twitter are now insisting that developers need to be authenticated before they can use the API, so that the company can “better understand the applications being developed and to prevent any malicious use”, said Sippey.

But that’s not all – whereas previously Twitter offered a ‘one size fits all’ approach, they are now introducing strict limitations on how often apps can access the API. In addition, Twitter plans to begin enforcing stricter guidelines for new applications that wish to use the API, as part of a redesign of its “Developer Rules of the Road”.

Twitter signed off by saying that all developers would be expected to switch to the new API in the next six months.