The US Federal Trade Commission has begun talking to developers to assess whether Twitter’s business practices harm competition, as part of a preliminary inquiry, Bloomberg reported. The agency is said to be responding to complaints that the company is making it harder for some software developers to design apps which use APIs to connect to the service, although it was also noted that as yet the investigation has not been made public. The report notes that Twitter client developer UberMedia confirmed it has been contacted, and that it intends to comply with the request for information.

Earlier this year, it was reported that Twitter had contacted developers to tell them not to build “standard Twitter client apps,” and that a growing number of subscribers were accessing the service via tools provided by Twitter itself. To this end, Twitter bought TweetDeck earlier this year, in order to improve its own products for consumers. It was also reported that Twitter had blocked access to its APIs by UberMedia apps for unspecified reasons, although it was reported that this was related to issues which “include, but aren’t limited to, a privacy issue with private Direct Messages longer than 140 characters, trademark infringement, and changing the content of users’ Tweets in order to make money.”