Understanding home_timeline statuses limit?

Question

According to Twitter's documentation at https://dev.twitter.com/doc/get/statuses/home_timeline, "This method is can only return up to 800 statuses, including retweets."

I understand that you can only retrieve up to 200 statuses per call, but I don't understand the 800 total statuses limit.

Is it a per-app limit of 800 statuses? How do Twitter clients like Twitdroid retrieve all my statuses then?

Are you only able to get 800 statuses over a certain time period? That is, if I make repeated calls to home_timeline today I can only get 800 statuses, but if I get 800 today and then wait until tomorrow to make another call to home_timeline, will it still not work?

I'm trying to retrieve all the statuses on my home_timeline in the last couple months but because of this limit I'm only able to get about 800 of them. How can I understand and work around this limit?

Answer 1

You are limited to the 800 most recent statuses available in home_timeline at any given time. For example if if you page through and get 800 statuses then wait until 100 new statuses are created by people you follow then the oldest 100 statuses from the previous crawl will no longer be available through home_timeline.

Answer 2

Using home_timeline you can get at any instant the latest 800 (tweets or statuses whichever are the most recent) for a user. But, it can include only at most 200 statuses.

Other clients collect these status' at different times so that at some time they have 800 unique recent status'.