Twitter wooing Indian developers with Fabric app development suite

By Ajay Pai & Jayadevan PK

BENGALURU: Microblogging site Twitter is wooing Indian developers with Fabric, the company’s free mobile app development suite. “Fabric takes the best of Twitter and exposes it to third parties,” said Arvinder Gujral, head of business development for Twitter in Asia-Pacific.

Fabric includes Crashlytics, which lets developers identify bugs, crashes and beta test their apps, and Twitter Kit, for developers to embed tweets natively into their apps.The microblogging site has also opened up Digits, a phone-based authentication service, as part of Fabric, which was launched in October. MoPub, a mobile ad server owned by Twitter, allows developers to drive advertising.

“From the perspective of Twitter, our platform has largely grown because of innovation by users and our partners,” said Gujral, who kicked off a Twitter hackathon on Wednesday.

The microblogging site, however, has a history of strained relations with third-party developers and app publishers.

Last month, Twitter terminated third-party agreements with resellers including Gnip and DataSift, who use complete and unfiltered streams of tweets, known as ‘firehose’ data, to drive analytics. In 2012, after Twitter made changes to its application programmers interface (API), through which developers access Twitter to build services, many third-party Twitter clients had to shut. For Twitter, India is one of its biggest developer markets.

According to Vserv, a local app marketing platform, India is home to the largest group of app developers and has the second-largest Android user group on the internet.