Twitter Wants to Dominate Apps By Winning Over Developers
Twitter is trying to make itself an essential part of the app ecosystem with a new suite of tools aimed at mobile developers. Those tools, announced Wednesday and bundled together in a free service called Fabric, put Twitter in more direct competition with Google and Facebook for control of the mobile future. Fabric is comprised of a suite of individual tools that together help developers deal with many of the issues they face getting their apps up and running. Crashlytics, a company Twitter bought in 2013, will help developers analyze crash rates for their apps and improve stability. MoPub, another recent Twitter acquisition, is an ad exchange that allows developers to easily serve ads in their apps that are bid on in real-time auctions. The third leg of Fabric, called Twitter Sign In, will let people sign into different apps using their Twitter login credentials rather than a username and password specifically for that app. Similarly, a new service called Digits will let people sign into apps using their cellphone number instead of a username and password. Outside of Digits, Twitter had offered some form of these services before, but they hadn't been wrapped up in one simple-to-use interface. Announced at the company's first-ever mobile developer conference, Fabric is something of an olive branch Twitter is extending to the development community after the social network tightened access to its API a few years ago. Whether app makers will play nice with Twitter now remains to be seen.