Twitter has launched a new mobile development kit, Fabric, letting developers create cross-platform apps for iOS and Android.
The social network hopes will get its technology embedded in a new generation of apps and services.
The move brings Twitter into direct competition with Amazon, Facebook and Google, which provide the back-end support and tools that developers need to build mobile apps.
The company announced a list of companies, including AOL, Kickstarter, McDonalds and Spotify, which are already using Fabric’s services.
More than 1,000 developers packed the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco for Flight, Twitter’s first developers conference since it became a public company.
The chief executive, Dick Costolo, said the new service, called Fabric, was designed to help mobile app developers at every stage of their development.
The free service will help with analysing crashes, mobile ads and embedding the company’s real-time information in new services.
Launching the tool, Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo said: “As builders of mobile apps the more you can focus on building delightful user experiences the less you have to focus on dealing with unreadable crash reports, the easier. The less you have to sort out and cobble together your beta testers, the better. The quicker you can incorporate a new ad network, the better. The less you have to worry about messaging infrastructure, the better.”
It comes after a series of disappointing results from Twitter, whose user growth rate is slowing even as it proves it can be a profitable business. Twitter reports its quarterly earnings next week. Last quarter the company received a strong boost from the World Cup and revenues soared. However, Twitter also reported a continued decline in how much time people were spending on the service.
The company also announced a new service it hopes will replace email and password sign-in on mobile. The service, called Digits, will enable people to sign up for new apps in two steps – sending a request and confirming their mobile number. Jeff Seibert, Crashlytics’ co-founder, said he hoped the service would prove more secure than passwords and more popular than “social log-ins” – where people use Facebook or other social media companies to confirm their identity.
Analysis- a more mobile audience than Facebook needs app innovation
Itay Gadot, VP of Sales and Marketing at cross-channel advertising platform dmg, commented on the launch of Fabric: “The launch of Fabric is good news not just for Twitter and the developer community, but also for marketers. Mobile advertising is crying out for more innovation and with 78% of Twitter’s users using it on their mobile, compared to 30% of Facebook users, it will be an excellent proving ground for developing ad tech. Add to this the versatility of the content that Twitter users generate, which is generally more informative for marketers than Facebook likes, and Fabric potentially presents a great source of data for advertisers.
“Making app development easier is exactly what Twitter and the developer community needs. It might make Facebook sweat a bit as they know they need to step up their mobile game and now they might have the migration of developers to Fabric to consider.”
Watch this video from Bloomberg discussing the deal here:
