Twitter Unveils Fabric Toolkit for Mobile Developers

Twitter has announced its new toolkit for mobile developers in an effort to help them create better apps with greater ease. Called Fabric, the kit was unveiled during Flight, the company’s first developer conference. According to Jeff Seibert, Fabric’s Product Director, the project was conceived with “ease of use in mind” and that “most features only require a few lines of code.”

Figure 1

Fabric is divided into four categories that Twitter believes addresses the biggest and most common challenges that developers face. Figure 1 above is Crashlytics, which was designed to address the stability issues found in apps. As Twitter has pointed out, all apps crash, and if they continue to do so, people will eventually disregard poorly ranked ones. Crashlytics was designed to detect, access, and fix bugs more quickly so that developers can focus more on building their apps rather than debugging them. Additionally, Crashlytics is able to identify the root cause of a bug “down to the exact line of code,” saving developers even more time.

Figure 2

Distribution was the next challenge that Twitter highlighted, which is why they answered it with Twitter Kit. With this kit, developers will be able to stand out from other apps and “tap into Twitter to get the growth [they] want.” Figure 2 above shows Twitter Kit in use, with the Tweet composer embedded into an app so that users would not have to exit just to share a song they are listening to on Spotify. Additionally, authenticating with Twitter was also made much simpler, while certain apps will require user permission to share information.

Figure 3

App developers are also looking to earn off their creation, and Twitter wants to address the revenue challenge through Fabric. With more flexibility given to their MoPub advertising platform earlier this month, (and as seen in Figure 3 above) Twitter will also allow work with multiple ad networks and let developers directly serve ads. This in turn would let developers turn their apps into a business; something Twitter knows can be “daunting.” MoPub will also show developers the ads from the highest paying advertisers, allowing them to maximize revenue.

Figure 4

The most exciting feature of Fabric is a brand new service being introduced by Twitter. Digits addresses the identity challenge of apps, at the center of which are the users. Through Digits, developers can let users input their phone numbers—instead of email addresses or social IDs—in order to access their apps. It also will not “post anything on your user’s behalf since it isn’t tied to their social network accounts”. Best of all, it’s readily available in 216 countries and 28 languages across all mobile and web platforms.

Seibert says Fabric has been in development for over a year with the goal of addressing the challenges developers face by taking “what we learned from building Crashlytics, MoPub and Twitter itself.” Interested developers can get started here, while more information about Fabric can be found here.

Are you a mobile developer that’s made use of Fabric? What’s been your experience with it so far? Let us know in the Comments below.

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