It seems like everyone wants Twitter information embedded in their apps these days, well now the company is going to give the developers of these apps a helping hand with the launch of a new service called Fabric. Announced at its Flight developers conference in San Francisco – its first conference since going public in November 2013 – the service is broken down into three parts. These parts aim to address stability issues (think crashes, bugs etc), distribution (getting your product noticed in a competitive market), and revenue which serves to focus on making money from the apps being built.
In terms of stability, Twitter launched Crashlytics, which allows developers to identify bugs and find fixes for them far quicker. Forming a crucial part of this is Beta by Crashlytics, which is designed to get user feedback before an app launches and Answers by Crashlytics, which is all about real-time app analytics. Spotify has announced that it is already using Crashlytics. Then there is Twitter Kit, which addresses the distribution aspect and includes three products to help app developers (and publishers) get their product to the top of the pile in a very crowded marketplace. Delving deeper into this, Twitter has made it much easier to embed Tweets into an app; it’s now just about a few lines of code, as WSJ can attest to. The company has also simplified the Twitter sign in process to these apps, as well as letting people compose Tweets in app. Part of the sign on simplification is a new service called Digits, which allows people to sign up using a phone number, which they must then verify. Digits is designed to replace email and password sign in, while being quick, easy and secure. McDonalds is already using Digits in its Alarm app.
Finally, to improve revenue Twitter has taken the wraps off MobPub Kit, which is designed to maximize profits from adverts in app. The good news for developers is that it supports all major ad formats including banners, video and native ads and allows companies to choose the position of the ads and how often they appear in the content stream. The kits for these three areas (Crashlytics, Twitter Kit and MobPub) all ship separately but also integrate so developers can pick and choose the parts that are right for them.