Twitter launches Fabric Toolkit: Services for mobile developers

Beijing time October 23 Morning News, Twitter in Wednesday, the company's first mobile developers conference flight released a fabric toolkit, can help third-party developers to better design mobile applications. Executives such as Dick Costolo, the company's CEO, also attended the day's Dick Costello.

The launch was not entirely surprising, as it was expected that Twitter might launch such a tool. However, the move marks an important step in the way Twitter competes with Facebook, Google (532.71, 6.17, 1.17%) and Amazon (312.97, 2.36, 0.75%) to provide back-end infrastructure support for Third-party mobile developers.

Twitter's application Debugging tools developers Crashlytics and mobile application trading market MoPub have provided these services before, but this is the first time Twitter has packaged these features for developers.

Fabric does not just want to develop new applications on the basis of a Twitter platform. The toolkit contains three separate sections, two of which are unrelated to Twitter's core offerings. But Twitter wants to help developers design mobile apps whether or not they are related to Twitter's core offerings. The company wants to provide developers with free tools to help them design and run applications, and to build relationships with them, making Twitter a long-term benefit.

A handful of partners, including Spotify and Jawbone, have begun testing fabric. The features of these three free SDK (software development kits) are as follows:

Crashlytics SDK

The key to this part of fabric is to enhance the application stability. Crashlytics can help developers determine which line of code is causing the application to crash, and also help them distribute early versions of the application to test users. Twitter updated some of the services and features of Crashlytics in Wednesday, sending different versions of one application to different groups and adding support for the Android Native Development toolkit.

MoPub SDK

With a few lines of code, any developer can use MoPub to become its own application. The mobile ad market, which Twitter bought last year, can fill the blank ads in mobile apps by allowing advertisers to make real-time bids for ads. Developers can also use the MoPub SDK to fill a variety of advertising spots, including banner ads and native ads.

MoPub can make a contribution to Twitter's revenue. As an ad market, Twitter can extract a percentage of the cost of each ad. Twitter says the number of MoPub ads over the past 30 days has exceeded 170 billion.

Twitter SDK

This part can bring direct benefits to Twitter's products. For example, Twitter's universal logon service is part of this, and users can use their existing Twitter accounts to log in to new apps, or they can share the data back to Twitter.

Twitter's new SDK contains a product called digits, which allows users to create a new Third-party application account with just a mobile phone number. Other applications such as Snapchat and WhatsApp have already used this type of login, but Twitter can now simplify this way so that all third party developers can integrate this functionality into their applications with one line of code. This may be helpful for areas where e-mail penetration is low but still available for use in mobile phones.

Another important aspect of Twitter's latest SDK is that it will allow developers to embed Twitter messages directly into their applications. Although this can now be done, Jeff Saiboth, the fabric product manager, said the difficulty of the new software was significantly reduced. In other words, Twitter wants to push Twitter messages beyond the Twitter platform and wants developers to use the company's SDK to embed more Twitter messages in their apps. Users are expected to see more Twitter messages in their favorite apps in the future.

(Responsible editor: Lvguang)