Twitter Introduces Fabric, A Toolkit For Developers

In Twitter’s ‘Flight’ conference, CEO Dick Costolo announced their new modular SDK named Fabric. Fabric is a set of APIs which empowers developers to build apps on top of the Twitter platform. While describing the concept, Costolo said that with Fabric, they want developers to be more productive while developing apps for Twitter.

Fabric consists of three kits. Each kit specifically targets an area which Twitter aims to improve with the help of indie developers. The first kit is intended for Twitter, second is for MoPub (Twitter’s ad network), and the third one is for Crashlytics, a crash reporting solution. According to the brief, switching between these kits is as easy as dragging and dropping. Developers will be able to easily switch between kits by selecting which part of Fabric SDK they want to use into their IDE (Integrated Development Environment). The plugins for Xcode (iOS) and Eclipse (Android) will be available initially, but will eventually span across many platforms.

Fabric empowers developers with more control over button placement and the tweet composer. The MoPub kit will plug developers directly into Twitter’s ad marketplace while the Crashlytics kit will give deeper access to the crash reports of apps, thus helping developers to sort out the problem quickly.

Moreover, Fabric helps developers by pointing out ways to add different elements into their apps, so that they can develop quickly. For example, developers can now quickly add embedded media support to their Twitter clients. The existing system is complex and requires a ton of developer resources.

Fabric also offers a new seamless single sign-on. Now, developers can add a Twitter sign-in button in their apps. It also enable developers to ask for their users’ email address during sign-up.

Arguably, the most important feature of the new Twitter kit is called Digit. It gives apps the power to sign-up new users with just a phone number, which is a blessing for a lot of us, because there is one less user-id and password to remember. Using Digits, the account would be associated with one thing that is unique to you and will be hard to forget. According to Twitter, the sign-in is not happening through a Twitter account. It’s a new account for unique to the app and is completely customizable so that developers can set the theme of the log-in.

In the future, once you associate your number with an account, a token will be used to verify your identity. This authentication system could possibly replace the painful and rarely secure password system we use now.

Wrap Up

By the looks of it, Fabric will help developers to create apps that will change users’ experience with Twitter. The new modular SDK will enable developers to work closely yet independently with Twitter feeds, ads and crash tracking while offering convenience through features like Digits.