As expected, Twitter announced a new mobile platform for app developers called Fabric at its first-ever Flight conference. The company says it will make it easier for developers to build apps.
It’s made of three modular kits that address stability, distribution, revenue, and identity. It combines services from Twitter itself, as well as its Crashlytics and MoPub offerings and other things. Most features, it says, only require a few lines of code.
There’s a Crashlytics Kit (for stability), which includes Crashlytics’ Beta and Answers offerings and a preview of NDK support for Android developers who code in C/C++.
For distribution, there’s a Twitter kit, which includes native tweet embeds, a tweet composer, and Sign in with Twitter.
The MoPub Kit is for integrating ads into apps “with just a few clicks”.
Twitter also announced an offering called Digits, which is part of the Twitter Kit, and is basically sign-in with phone number. The company explains in a blog post:
It’s built on Twitter infrastructure so you don’t have to worry about managing multiple relationships with carriers and SMS interchanges. Digits is fully themeable so that it fits the user experience you’ve designed for your app. Digits won’t post anything on your user’s behalf since it isn’t tied to their social network accounts, including Twitter. And with Digits, your apps are ready for global adoption: it’s available immediately in 216 countries and in 28 languages, on iOS, Android and the web.
Digits also solves a number of issues for your users. Since Digits uses a phone number, there’s no need for users to remember complex passwords or usernames and all they have to share is a phone number to get started in your app.
Fabric is immediately available to attendees of the conference, and will be expanded to current Crashlytics and MoPub customers in the coming weeks, and then to the broader developer community. You can sign up here.
You can read more about all of this stuff here.
Here’s the current discussion out of Flight:
Here’s a live stream from the event:
Image via Twitter
