Twitter launches Fabric SDK, Digits lets you sign-in without password

Twitter held its first developers conference called Flight today where the company has certainly made a historical announcement. It almost felt as the social networking service is taking a giant leap – to solve the challenges that all developers face: app stability, distribution, monetizing and identity management. Twitter will take care of all with the new mobile app development framework called Fabric.

It seems Twitter is making good use of its acquired assets. In today’s showdown, the company combined the solutions of Crashlytics & MoPub to enable developers build more stable apps and monetize their app through the world’s largest mobile ad exchange.

The company statement says,

Fabric was built with ease of use in mind. Installation takes just minutes, and most features only require a few lines of code – so you spend less time managing SDKs and more time building the best experience for your users.

Digits: Password-less sign in

Developers have the ability to sign up new users merely with a phone number, without any password in their apps.

When it comes to identity management, developers can now use Twitter’s seamless single sign-in systems and rich streams of real-time content for greater distribution.

Twitter’s blog highlighted

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 theme-able 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.

This has huge potential to change the local commerce arena. Twitter has tested this with McDonalds, as a way to authenticate users who redeem an offer. If this takes off coupon distribution and redemption, it will be the cool kids affair all over again. This could be the one thing local merchants were waiting for -- to bridge the online and offline identity gap.

Dick Costolo said that Twitter "wanted to approach this not from the perspective of what would be best for Twitter, but what would help [developers] be most productive."

Crashlytics:

Twitter acquired Crashlytics, for $100 in feb 2013 that was helping app developers in bug-fixing. And twitter hasn’t killed the company. Now Crashlytics resurfaced stronger to make the time frame between detecting, accessing and fixing bugs much shorter for app makers. Instead of breaking their head to detect bugs, now developers can devote more time on building great apps. The company blog statement underscored,

In just the past 30 days, Crashlytics identified over 5.5 billion crashes. And beyond just identifying them, Crashlytics is able to isolate the root cause down to the exact line of code, reducing the time it takes for you to fix the bug and submit an update.

Show me the money

Here is where all Twitter’s future money lies.

MoPub! Back in 2013 twitter bought MoPub for $350M to be part of money minting ad exchange industry. Now twitter has refined it and brought it back to developers as “The MoPub Kit”. It makes integrating ads and monetizing your apps, an affair of just a few click. Twitter says MoPub is the leading monetization platform for mobile app developers, designed to maximize ad revenue for apps through a single, comprehensive platform.

Back in 2012 twitter revoked/restricted API access to developer community that made it what it is, a platform.

I am not sure if these announcements are going to restore the faith of developer community that was stabbed on the back by twitter. Let us all wait and see – time always tells.