There’s a good news for app developers. On Wednesday at Twitter’s first annual developer conference Flight, the company announced a new tool for developers which will allow users to log-in to mobile applications using their phone numbers rather than a traditional username and password combinations.
SAY NO TO PASSWORD
The service will be called Digits, aimed at application developers looking for an easier, password-free login option for their mobile applications – in a similar way to Snapchat, WhatsApp and Viber that rely only on verified users’ mobile numbers for sign-in, rather than the traditional ID and password combination.
"This is an entirely new native mobile sign up service that makes mobile-first sign-up frictionless, and creates an identity relationship entirely between you and your users," said Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, speaking at the Twitter Flight developer conference in San Francisco.
DEVELOPERS DON’T TRUST TWITTER
On one hand, where other social networking companies encouraged third-party developers to develop their own applications and services on top of the platform. Twitter always tried to reassert control over its product and platform and therefore being hated by developer community, but this new move will definitely solve this all.
According to the app developer Marco Arment, Twitter can’t be trusted again. "We’re just innocent bystanders getting hit whenever this fundamentally insecure, jealous, unstable company changes direction, which happens every few years," wrote Arment, who most recently developed Overcast, an app for listening to podcasts. "Twitter will never, and should never, have any credibility with developers again."
HOW DIGITS WORKS
Basically, Digits uses SMS messages to control access to registered accounts. When a developer adds Digits to its application, the user will be able to sign-in to that application using his or her mobile phone number.
Once the user provides the mobile phone number, Twitter will send a verification code on the provided mobile number via an SMS. User then enters that the SMS-based confirmation code to the log-in, and have access to the application. Note that each code Twitter sends you via SMS will expire after it's used. The process is just like a two-step verification one.
INTRODUCING FABRIC
Digits is one of many products announced at the developers conference in San Francisco. The company also introduced Fabric – a free software development kit for apps. Fabric will have three components:
- MoPub – It is a mobile advertising platform bought by Twitter for $350m last year. It will help developers monetise their products on the Twitter platform.
- Crashlytics – Crash reporting service, Crashlytics, bought by Twitter for $100m in 2013, will help developers test and build their apps as well as debug them.
- TwitterKit – It enables apps to integrate into Twitter for streamlining real-time information. For example, the popular transport app Citymapper will now Tweet live updates from San Francisco’s Bart train system to users. TwitterKit allows developers to embed Tweets natively, as well as allows users to log into apps via Twitter.
"Fabric was built with ease of use in mind," Twitter's director of product, Jeff Seibert, wrote in a blog post. "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."
You can also go to the Digits website, which looks very basic at this time, in order to know more about it. Digits is launching now in 216 countries and 28 languages, which represents a serious move from Twitter’s end in terms of owning a piece of the mobile landscape.
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