Dynamic routing supercharges Digits login performance

by Chris Oryschak, Product Manager

Fabric Digits introduces dynamic routing

Digits is the best way to get more people into your apps and build safe communities through simple phone number verification. We’re constantly iterating to reduce the friction — and remove the password headaches — of the login process.

SMS confirmation codes are a critical component of the Digits login experience. This confirmation code empowers your users to verify their real identity in a fast, simple, and secure way. However, behind the scenes the technology powering Digits is anything but simple. Digits extends Twitter’s SMS infrastructure, which has been battle-tested over the past 10 years to emerge as the gold standard for consistent, reliable delivery of messages.

Today, we’re happy to announce our newest iteration to further improve SMS delivery and boost  login conversion rates: dynamic routing.

Optimized delivery of SMS confirmation codes

The path to an app user’s device is hard: roaming, carrier changes, overloaded networks, and other carrier issues can cause messages to drop. Dynamic routing intelligently sends your Digits SMS confirmation codes through the best quality route possible to thousands of carriers in over 217 countries so your users can promptly log in any time, any place.

Built-in safeguard

If extenuating circumstances delay an SMS confirmation code from arriving quickly, Digits Voice Fallback will come to the rescue and deliver the codes via a voice call — in an industry-leading 29 languages and dialects. With Digits, all your users need is their phone number; they won’t need to connect online profiles or remember annoying passwords.

Completely free & automatically enabled

As always, Digits offers leading performance, features, and user interfaces designed by onboarding experts that scale with your business, absolutely free. We want you to focus on your users, not on cost or complicated setups. And, there’s no effort needed on your part — we’ve already enabled dynamic routing for you!

Dynamic routing is another way we’re making it easy for you to grow your app’s user base with simple sign-up and pain-free phone number verification. We can’t wait for you to see your SMS delivery and login conversion rates soar even higher — especially in emerging markets in the middle east and Africa!

Digits March update

by Chris Oryschak, Product Manager

Now that spring has arrived, we’ve been hard at work this March shipping a number of upgrades: new languages for voice verifications, a new embeddable web widget and user experience updates across the board to further improve your onboarding performance.

Unlock growth with four new languages for voice verification

Growing your app internationally can be daunting, and that’s why Digits comes packed with phone number support for 217 countries as well as 25 languages for voice verification. Today, we’re releasing support for four more languages to voice, bringing our total support to 29 languages:

  • Arabic
  • Thai
  • Indonesian
  • Tamil

The new support will automatically be enabled and default to the corresponding language based on the language settings on the user’s device. Now, with this latest support, you can be more aggressive and look to grow in countries that speak these four languages, where permissible. Beyond just providing you a translation, we’ve put much thought into localizing the experience by having native speakers record the voice tracks of the new languages. With Digits, it’s never been easier to grow your user base.

To get the new languages support, just upgrade Digits to the latest version within your Fabric Mac app / Android IDE plugins.

Embeddable on web with enhanced UX

As part of our mission to help you boost your conversion rate, we released two new upgrades  earlier this month. First, our new embeddable web widget further streamlines the sign-in flow for your users while matching the ambience of your website. We also released new UX enhancements for iOS, Android and web to make it easier for your users to fall back on alternatives when SMS fails.

Read more on the original announcement!

Here’s our internal changelog:

iOS

Android

  • Shipped four new languages for voice verification.
  • Released enhanced UI for fallbacks when SMS fails.

Web

  • Released embeddable and themable Digits for web widget.

Major Upgrades: embeddable Digits for web and cross-platform UX enhancements

by Chris Oryschak, Product Manager

When we first launched Digits, we made quality a central focus of the value we bring to our customers. Since then, we've continued to enhance the overall ease of using Digits while helping businesses improve their conversion rates.

Today, we're releasing several UX upgrades for Digits on iOS, Android, and web -- along with a new embeddable web widget!

Enhanced UX. Cross-platform.

The path to getting the most users for your app depends on various aspects of your app’s quality and ease of use. With Digits, our customers see an average onboarding success rate of 85 percent when users entered their phone numbers to access an app. While our average success rate is one of the highest in the industry, there was more we could do to give end users more flexibility, while minimizing support efforts for your business.

With the new UX upgrades for iOS, Android and web, we've made it even easier for your users to fallback on alternatives when an SMS with their confirmation code fails to arrive. Now, users can immediately request another SMS or a phone call for their code. This way, you can ensure a seamless user onboarding flow while reducing the costs that come with forgotten passwords or support tickets.

Now embeddable on web

While we were enhancing the UX for Digits on web, we also built a brand new widget that makes Digits embeddable on any webpage!

Before, users signing in via Digits on web saw the sign-in form via a popup. Now, with the new widget, the form is right within your webpage, further streamlining the sign-in flow for your users. On top of that, you can now customize the look & feel of the form and match it exactly to the ambience of your mobile app website. 

We couldn't be happier to give you these upgrades and see them working in your apps!

Digits January Update

by Chris Oryschak, Product Manager

After ringing in the new year with family and friends, we got back to work to build the best tools you’ll love in 2016.

Integrated with the #1 mobile analytics tool

Many of you have told us that having actionable insights over your user conversion funnel through Digits would be immensely helpful in growing your user base. For example, maybe you want to know where users downloading the latest version of your app are signing up from.

With our Answers integration, the #1 mobile analytics solution on iOS, your team will have visibility into how many of your customers are taking advantage of your simple onboarding flows with Digits — all in real time. Now you have the clarity you need to better understand and serve your users.

We’ll be rolling this out as an open beta. Simply download the latest Digits and Answers SDKs and you’ll start seeing the new data on your Answers dashboard!

Focusing our efforts

To focus our efforts on building the best tools, we are planning to deprecate support for devices running iOS 7 after this version 1.15 release. But don’t worry! If you still need to support devices with iOS 7, you can continue to use older versions of Digits Kit through CocoaPods. We’ll continue to maintain security releases on this 1.15 release to cover old iOS versions for the coming months.

Introducing Digits for tvOS

by Chris Oryschak, Product Manager

Just last month at Flight, we released verified email to make verifying users even simpler. Since then, we’ve been heads down solving another challenge for developers: verifying users for apps on TV. Unlike mobile or web, the user experience of traditional login and verification methods are cumbersome.That’s why today, we’re thrilled to introduce Digits for tvOS to help you solve this challenge, starting with Apple TV.

The Future of Identity Comes to tvOS

Many of you have told us that logging into apps on Apple TV is hard for end users for a number of reasons:

  • First, web views and login methods that rely on oAuth (i.e., social login) aren't supported.
  • Second, traditional login methods (i.e., username/email and password) are tedious on the TV given the nonstandard input style. Just imagine if your user has to sign up for a service, confirm his/her account and then sign in with his/her full email and password via the TV remote without a keyboard!

There needed to be a better way for users to log into apps on TVs without a standard input method. Now, with Digits, your users can now seamlessly and safely log into your Apple TV apps. All it takes is a few lines of code.

digits-for-tvos-authorize-code.png

Using Digits’ device authorization, your app on the Apple TV will show a short alphanumeric code. Your user then simply enters the code on digits.com/appletv via their laptop or smartphone to authorize the device to their account. Once that’s done, the TV device receives a Digits session for the user’s account which you can use to instantly identify your user and personalize their experience.

To get Digits for tvOS, download the latest Fabric Mac app. Check out our docs for tvOS on how to get started. We’re very excited to support the next generation of experience you’re crafting for the living room!

 

Launching Verified Email for Digits

by Chris Oryschak, Product Manager

In the last year, Digits has grown tremendously to bring phone verification to developers around the world. In August, we released our voice verification feature to improve conversion performance while giving more flexibility to our users. But we didn’t stop there.

Today at Flight, we announced that we’re releasing verified email support. Furthermore, two of the top social video apps in the world — Vine and Dubsmash — are now using Digits to verify their users.

 

Email preferred? No problem.

If you’re using a system that verifies users through email, it can be hard scaling your email delivery infrastructure. Our solution for this: to let you request that users provide an email via Digits. We’ll take care of the rest!

With the new email verification support, you can choose to request an email address from your users as they verify by phone or sign in with Digits. You don’t have to build custom email verification functionality or an expensive, complex infrastructure to support it. Simply enable the feature in a few lines of code, and you’ll create a portable identity layer for your users. This is one of the top requests we see, and we’re excited to offer it.


Serving the most popular social video apps in the world

In May, Amazon and Periscope integrated Digits into their services to simplify user verification and login. And now, just a few months later, we’re thrilled to have two of the top social video apps adopt Digits: Vine and Dubsmash.

To build user trust and prevent spam, Vine is using Digits to authenticate users simply by using their phone numbers. We’re also happy to see the culmination of work we’ve done with custom SMS messaging to help solidify trust with users throughout the flow.

At Dubsmash we are always striving to simplify our onboarding experience while protecting users from abuse and spam. With customizable SMS, our brand is represented in every touch point to our users, building trust and keeping our conversion rates high!

We couldn’t be happier to get the new email verification support into your hands. We hope it helps you grow your app base, and will continue building out Digits as the best way to help developers onboard verified users.

Digits: A Growth Story

by Chris Oryschak, Product Manager

When we launched Digits last year, our goal was to make phone verification incredibly simple for developers around the globe. Over the past eleven months, we’ve found that one of the most popular use cases for Digits was to build a phone-based, seamless sign in flow since the phone number is now the mobile identity. Many top apps in the world have been using Digits to deliver an exceptional onboarding experience, allowing them to grow their user base.

Today we’re thrilled to share a story of how a member of the Twitter family, Periscope, has been using Digits as one of their main growth tools to serve over 10 million accounts as of early August.

periscope-digits.png

Having launched just five months ago, Periscope is now a top 10 social networking app on the App Store and Google Play, enabling millions of people to broadcast and communicate with their friends wherever they are — live in that moment. When they were first considering using Digits, they had one main goal in mind: find a solution that optimizes the sign in experience, makes their users happy and grows the app even faster.

With Digits, many of our customers are seeing, on average, a success rate of 85 percent when users enter in their phone numbers to onboard their apps. For apps with millions of users like Periscope, being able to have a tool like Digits means that more users will have a seamless onboarding experience. A better signin experience means a lower bounce rate, and ultimately a higher retention rate. We’re thrilled that we are a part of Periscope’s tremendous growth and we’re looking forward to continue supporting Periscope on their journey.

In his own words, here’s Kayvon’s take:

Digits gives us the ability to deliver a fantastic native signup experience to our users who want an alternative to social logins. Onboarding and verifying new users is refreshingly simple, and has helped us achieve extraordinary growth especially in the developing world. Any app that wants to support phone signup should be using Digits!

We are ecstatic to see the results thus far for Periscope and many other apps Digits has been supporting. This is a giant step toward our mission, and we’re excited to continue to support you as you build incredible apps. Together, we can aim to reach every person in the world.

Digits August Update

by Israel Camacho, Sr. Software Engineer

Even though the summer is drawing to a close, we were still heads down in August shipping new features and upgrades to make Digits even more useful to developers. This month we were excited to release voice verification for Android as well as enhanced theming capabilities on both iOS and Android!

Your brand. Front and center.

Digits was designed to give you complete control around the user experience in your app. Before, you could already customize the colors of the fonts and button within the Digits flow, but we didn't stop there.

Now, you can incorporate your company's or app's logo right at the beginning of the Digits flow along with a custom background color or image. With the new functionality, your brand is front and center and the user experience can feel completely native to your app -- all easily configured in a few lines of code.

Launching voice verification for Android

Back in July, we started our rollout of voice verification for web and iOS for certain countries to enable a phone call for verification. This month we rolled out the same feature on Android. Simply upgrade Digits within your Android IDE plugin to enable voice verification. 

We'll be bringing it to more countries soon -- so stay tuned!

Here’s our internal changelog:

Web

  • Added support for voice verification

iOS SDK

  • Added support for voice verification

  • Shipped UINavigationController alternative to modal flow

  • Increased theming options including custom fonts and logo placement

  • Made performance enhancements to Digits on iPad

Android SDK

  • Fixed an issue where DigitsSessionVerifier invalidated the current session

  • Added support for voice verification

  • Raised minimum SDK version from 8 to 9

  • Made an update for twitter-core 1.7.2 guest auth fixes

  • Added SessionListener to receive session changes

  • Increased theming options including logo placement

Launching Voice Verification and the Ability to Change Phone Numbers

by Michael Ducker, Product Manager

Over the past nine months, we’ve been humbled by the support and feedback we’ve received to grow our platform and reach developers all over the world. A big part of that is being able to consistently think about how we can make phone verification better. Our team has thought of different scenarios where end users might experience various use cases to complete their phone verification process. So, just in case your users change their phone number or an SMS delivery doesn’t work, you’ll have another layer of protection, to make sure they get verified. We’re thrilled to say that we’ve recently added both of those capabilities!

Phone number changed? No problem.

We know that a big concern when adopting phone numbers in your app is what to do when users change their number. Don’t worry! Digits manages your entire user lifecycle. Rather than taking on all of this hard work yourself by relying on other APIs, Digits simplifies this entire process for you.

Users can simply visit digits.com and update their phone numbers within their dashboard — on both mobile or web. We recognize you need to know about these changes, so the next time the user launches your app, we’ll notify you in app of the new number. See how to receive session updates on both iOS and Android in our docs.

This is only the first of many phone number change scenarios, and we're excited to support more scenarios in the future!

Phone verification — now via both text and voice

We spend a tremendous amount of time making sure that our global SMS delivery rates are better than the industry standard. When an SMS fails, we’ll now fall back to a phone call for verification.

Instead of having to build a new UI, contract with new providers and handle new services when using REST APIs, the power of the Digits SDK gives you all this for free. Simply upgrade Digits to the latest within your Fabric Mac app / Android IDE plugins to enable voice verification:

We’re starting this an experiment on web and iOS in certain countries, so stay tuned as we open it up to more clients and countries in the near future!

We made some other enhancements in July as well. Here’s our internal changelog:

Infrastructure

  • Added SMS support for telecommunications in China

Web

  • Added support for voice confirmation for phone verification in designated rollout countries

Android

  • Use AuthRequestQueue for all API request to ensure we always have a valid DigitsAPIClient
  • Fixed critical issue where Digits sessions are lost when using Proguard
  • Added Phone number change and Session update notifications

Digits June Update

by Michael Ducker, Product Manager

Now that it’s officially summer, we’re sharing all the “hot” updates we’ve been working on. This month, we focused on optimizing the entire Digits experience for your users -- everything from visual integration to intelligent error handling to new language support.

Text field that perfectly blends Digits into your app

In June we continued to ship upgrades that make Digits seamlessly blend with your UI. Our latest enhancement allows you to launch the Digits flow from a text field -- in addition to buttons -- which gives you even more flexibility to make Digits feel completely native within your app. This is especially powerful for building a phone verification experience to help users fend-off spam or attacks on their accounts.

For example, suppose you've implemented Digits into your "user profile settings" page within your app. Inside that page, it would be ideal to show a phone number text-input field -- instead of a button -- so users can enter their number directly to have their account verified:

     

     

Once the user enters their number, Digits will launch and automatically pre-populate the phone number field within the Digits flow:

With these latest upgrades, you can build an even better phone verification experience that not only blends perfectly with your app's ambience but also makes the process completely seamless for users.

Inline error messaging

One of the biggest pain points customers told us about on iOS was the pop up message they would get when phone numbers were invalid. We heard you loud and clear, and in June we've built out a subtle notification to handle the user input error. Now, when users enter their phone numbers within the Digits flow, they'll know exactly what they need to fix in context:

     

     

Enhanced language support

When we launched Digits last year, we already supported 32 languages with Digits' phone verification flow. Now, your apps' users will see the SMS confirmation code message in their devices' language -- the language that they're most familiar with.

We’ve also fine-tuned our networking and session management functionality. All of these enhancements and upgrades are available in the latest Digits Kit -- so be sure to upgrade Digits in your Mac app / Android IDE plugins today!

Here’s our internal changelog:

iOS

  • Fixed several networking bugs

  • Reduced the network error dialogue

  • Fixed bugs around our session management and token handling

  • Now making fewer network requests because we do basic form field validation client-side

  • Only show the resend confirmation code button after 30 seconds

  • Pin code field is now a password text field

  • Return normalized phone number on signup and login

Android

  • Fixed crash on StateButton for multiple clicks

  • Added a new public API to authenticate method that allows developers to provide a phone number

  • Changed Pin code edit text to password type

  • Return normalized phone number on signup and login

  • Reduced the network error dialogue

  • Fixed bugs around our session management and token handling

  • Fixed a memory leak and rare crash on Android

Digits May Update

by Michael Ducker, Product Manager

Taking a break from sipping margaritas in the foggy San Francisco landscape, we’re back to ridding the world of passwords forever. This month, we released Digits as its own kit, open-sourced Digits for Android, added major new customers — and more!

Introducing Digits Kit

Many of you have already adopted the Twitter Kit in Fabric, where Digits previously resided, primarily to access its key features: user authentication via two-step verification, custom social graphs and phone-based sign-in. But we wanted to make it easier to get all of the features and functionality Digits provides in the quickest way possible — as its own kit. That’s why in May, we separated Digits from Twitter Kit so you can install Digits seamlessly with complete flexibility to get the functionality you need. 

Following our long-standing respect for the strong open source mindset that is the basis of Android, we also took this opportunity to open source Digits for Android with its own dedicated repo. For those of you building on Android, you’ll now have complete transparency into our code through the Digits artifact. See our docs for more on Digits Kit or check out the Digits for Android repo. 

Major integrations: Amazon Cognito & Periscope

When Digits first launched, we imagined that brands all of sizes would connect their users all over the world with just their phone number. We’ve seen the likes of Buzzfeed, McDonald’s and Rdio use Digits for sign-in. In May, we were thrilled that Amazon, as well as Periscope (which Twitter recently acquired) have integrated Digits into their services.

For example, Amazon Cognito helps to securely manage and synchronize app data for users across their devices so that apps can work even when those devices are offline. With new, native support for Digits within Cognito, you can easily authenticate users without having to manage passwords or operate any backends. And you can offer your users a very simple onboarding flow. Check out their blog post on how to configure Digits for Amazon Cognito.

On the other side, Periscope integrated Digits into their app just six weeks after they were live in the app store. Now users can now sign in with their phone number, which helps Periscope grow its user base even more. 

 

Here’s our internal changelog:

Digits Core

  • Implemented new binaries, plugins and mac app for Digits Kit split from Twitter Kit
  • Open sourced Digits for Android
  • Shipped support for iPad
  • Improved logging of failures on iOS
  • Added normalized phone numbers to our responses
  • Introduce DGTOAuthSigning to generate OAuth Echo headers for Digits
  • Digits is now a separate framework

API Endpoint

  • Switched endpoint to using api.digits.com
  • Added new endpoint for secure validation of phone numbers

Accounts & Authentication

  • Fixed authentication issues causing user visible errors on iOS
  • Fixed issue affecting Digits verification of some Canadian numbers

Integrations

  • Digits implemented by Periscope
  • Digits implemented by Amazon Cognito

Open Sourcing Digits for Android

by Israel Camacho, Senior Software Engineer

One of our goals for Digits is to build tools that developers love and trust, starting with mobile identity. Long-respecting the strong open source mindset that Android found its roots in, we knew we wanted to strengthen our support of the Android community, and find more ways to help you build amazing apps!

That’s why we’re excited to announce that we’re open sourcing Digits for Android! Now, you’ll have complete transparency into our code through the Digits artifact.

Check out our repo here.

Introducing Digits Kit

By Michael Ducker, Product Manager, Digits

Since launching Digits in October, we’ve been thrilled with the response from the developer community. Digits is now used by some of the largest companies in the world to build an incredible onboarding experience for its users.

We’ve adopted Digits to ease the pain of getting users in developing markets to register. This should greatly improve our numbers!

Based on demand, today we’re splitting Digits out from the Twitter Kit. Now, you can install Digits seamlessly with complete flexibility to get the functionality you need.

We’ve seen many of you adopt the Twitter Kit in Fabric, where Digits resided, primarily to access its key features: user authentication via two-step verification, custom social graphs and phone-based sign-in. We wanted to make it easier to get all of the features and functionality Digits provides in the quickest way possible — as its own kit.

We also wanted to make phone number login more secure. Getting hundreds or thousands of phone number requests from users can be hard to validate. That’s why we’ve rolled out api.digits.com, making it easier to validate Digits tokens. With this, you can trust their phone numbers to build even richer experiences such as custom features built on top of your mobile graph. There’s no work required on your part and you can use the same API key from your existing implementation with Twitter Kit.

For those of you already using Digits, don’t worry — there are no code changes needed. Within the Fabric plugin, simply click “upgrade” next to the Digits Kit and you’ll be up and running with all the code in your app just as it was before.

See our new docs for more on the new Digits Kit. If you haven’t experienced Digits yet, get started today.


Digits: The future of identity

by Michael Ducker, Product Manager, Digits

A few months ago we launched Digits to make the onboarding experience for your app that much better. We wanted app login to be simple: with just a few lines of code, users can sign up for your app with just their phone number.

When it comes to your global growth, this is crucial. Phone numbers are the primary, native identity for mobile users in emerging markets – which now account for over 70% of the world's internet population of 3 billion users*. In those markets, many users only have access to mobile phones, and have never experienced an email and password login system on a desktop.

Digits can help you tap in to these markets with minimal effort. With Digits, you can:

  • Enable users to sign up and log in using their phone number

  • Add friend-finding functionality and two-step verification to your mobile app

  • Grow your mobile graph

  • Solve all of your onboarding and authentication needs with a few lines of code

We’re super excited to help you grow your user base around the world. Digits is currently available in 216 countries and in 32 languages, on iOS, Android and the web. With more features coming soon, you can download Digits here and start growing your user base!