Introducing Fabric mission control

by Meekal Bajaj, Product Manager

Since we launched the Fabric mobile app for developers in February, we’ve been using Fabric’s web dashboard (fabric.io) to stay on top of how our own app is performing. Many times we found ourselves switching back and forth between different dashboards for our production and dogfood builds. Knowing that many of you monitor a lot more apps every day, we set out to build something that can make this experience completely seamless and empower you to know your apps’ performance easily at any moment.

Today, we’re thrilled to introduce Fabric mission control — the pulse of all your apps on a single, intuitive dashboard.

One stop to keep up with all your apps

When key information about your apps lives across different dashboards, it’s hard for the team to have the context they need to make the best decisions. While Fabric today gives you the #1 crash reporting and mobile analytics tools that show you the pulse of your apps, those insights live on different dashboards on fabric.io. We wanted to take that experience to a whole new level.

With Fabric mission control, we bring together the critical top level information across all your apps onto one single dashboard. Now, you get a complete view to easily see the pulse of your apps at a glance.

We’ll be rolling out access and enabling the mission control dashboard for all customers over the next few days. Once it’s enabled on your account, it will automatically be set as your default starting page when visiting fabric.io. You can easily toggle mission control on and off to chose the dashboard experience that works best for you.

From our friends at BuzzFeed:

Fabric’s new mission control is the first thing we look at everyday. We have it up on the TVs at our office so we can monitor our DAU, crash rate etc. across all of our key apps at any given moment.

 

Data that truly matters — front and center

It’s important to stay on top of the most critical issues affecting your apps. Fabric sifts through millions of issues and events every day and brings you the most important information about your apps. We’ve distilled all that data on your mission control so you can hone in on the areas that need your attention right now.

On your new mission control, you can jump straight to critical issues or see a summary of how your top build is performing. If you’re wondering how well-tested your latest beta is, you can see that as soon as you open your web dashboard.

Key apps and data points —instantly accessible

Fabric lets you decide which apps you want to focus on, and in which order on mission control. Simply favorite an app to pin it to the top or reorder your apps so that the most important ones are the first you see. 

You can also easily locate an app or a number of apps via the search bar built right into your mission control. When searching, we filter the list in real-time to only show the apps that match what you are looking for. Clicking on each metric takes you directly to the details you need.

We couldn’t be happier to get this into your hands. We truly believe that the new Fabric mission control is yet another huge step toward our mission to help you build the best apps. Sign into fabric.io and check out the new mission control!

New milestone achieved: over 2 billion active devices

By Rich Paret, General Manager, Developer Platform

Ever since we launched Crashlytics four years ago, our mission has always been and remains the same: to build tools that mobile app development teams love. That’s why we built Fabric, which reached a huge milestone last July by serving over one billion active devices around the globe.

Today, just nine months after reaching our first milestone, we’re proud to share that we’ve doubled our previous achievement: Fabric is now serving over two billion active devices — measured on a 30-day basis — on both iOS and Android.

It’s been an amazing journey to see Fabric being used and trusted by tens of thousands of top apps around the world. Thank you for trusting your business to Fabric and Twitter; we take that commitment seriously and look forward to continue supporting you in building the best experiences for your customers. Let’s put a dent in the universe together.

Cheers,



fastlane has saved over 1 million developer hours

By Felix Krause, Founder of fastlane

Four years before joining Fabric, I was building an iOS app with two other developers. We were so excited to push the latest update to our customers, but we had to spend an entire day taking & uploading screenshots and figuring out how to use iTunes Connect. It was incredibly frustrating and I knew there had to be a better way.

Fast forward to 2015: I wanted to solve this pain for myself and other developers once and for all, so I built fastlane to streamline the entire app deployment process. What use to take days or weeks now takes minutes — or even seconds — using fastlane. Then 8 months ago, I had started monitoring how much time fastlane is saving for the community.

Today, I’m thrilled to share that fastlane has saved over 1 million developer hours. On behalf of the Fabric team, I’m humbled by the incredible response for fastlane thus far. I never imagined its impact would be this large.

With 1 million hours being equivalent to over 114 years, my Fabric colleagues and I were excited just thinking of all the cool things developers could do with all that time back. A few ideas we had:

  • Build 28 more Golden Gate Bridges in San Francisco
  • Circle the globe 15,000 times in an airplane
  • Watch all Star Wars movies 75,000 times
  • Make a round-trip flight in a space shuttle from Earth to Pluto almost 4 times

We look forward to continue supporting you in your app development journey. In the meantime, let us know what you've done with the time you saved — we’d love to hear it!

Fabric March update

By Jonathan Zazove, Product Manager

Between the holidays and celebrations in March, we haven’t forgotten our mission to build the best developer tools to make your lives easier. During March, we hunkered down and shipped a number of major releases: Fabric for Unity, Nuance Kit and fastlane for Android v1.0, among other upgrades and enhancements.

Doubling down on games with Fabric for Unity

For years, Twitter has helped game developers deliver amazing experiences through rich content and app distribution tools that drive discovery and conversation about your content. Within the Fabric team, we doubled down on that support by releasing Fabric for Unity earlier this month. Now, you can easily build, distribute, and monetize your games with best-in-class tools all readily accessible in one place.

Read more on the full announcement.

Nuance SpeechKit now available on Fabric

Today, we're thrilled to share that Nuance have made their SpeechKit SDK available via Fabric. Nuance gives you tools to quickly develop a natural speech interface for applications. They offer highly-accurate cloud speech recognition, an extensive portfolio of natural sounding text-to-speech voices, and the flexibility to use their speech with a variety of platforms and languages. Just like all of our kits on Fabric, you can install or update the SpeechKit with just a few clicks. We take care of all the grunt work like provisioning your keys, so if you already have an account with Nuance, you can easily onboard your app.

fastlane for Android: now official

Since we opened beta access to fastlane’s support for Android a few months ago, we’ve been expanding its capabilities and doubling down on serving the mobile ecosystem. Today, we're thrilled to share that we're officially releasing fastlane for Android v1.0. Now, you’ll get the same award-winning app deployment experience as on iOS. We’re really grateful for the strong fastlane community whose contributions helped bring a stable, reliable version for us to release. We're excited to continue helping you build, test and release the best apps and updates to the Google Play Store!

 

Here’s our changelog:

Fabric Platform

  • Unity

    • Released Unity plugin with Crashlytics, Answers and Twitter Kit integrations.

  • iOS

    • Shipped the Nuance SpeechKit.

  • Android

    • Shipped the Nuance SpeechKit.

    • Released fastlane for Android version 1.0.

Crashlytics Kit

Answers Kit

Digits Kit

Twitter Kit

  • iOS

    • Fixed issue using a `TWTRTimelineViewController` as the root view controller of a Storyboard.

    • Deprecated support for iOS 7.0.

    • Added TWTRTweetDetailViewController for showing full size images.

    • Added `geocode_specifier` property to `TWTRSearchTimelineDataSource` to allow filtering by location.

    • Added `topTweetsOnly` property to `TWTRSearchTimelineDataSource` to allow the default filtering of Tweets.

    • Changed `TWTRTimelineViewController` to use automatic cell heights.

    • Shipped automatic update on the timestamp on `TWTRTweetView` every 30 seconds.

    • Shipped support for Dynamic Type for accessible text sizes in `TWTRTweetView`.

    • Removed deprecated methods on `Twitter` class.

    • Removed methods from `TWTRTweetViewDelegate` in favor of `NSNotifications`.

    • Added TWTRLoginMethods enum to allow developers to decide which login method they would like to use.

    • Made `-[TWTRAPIClient uploadMedia:contentType:completion:]` public.

    • Remove the TWTRShareEmailViewController.

    • Improve image size selection logic for Tweets with attached media.

  • Android

    • Removed Verisign Class 3 Certificate from pinning list.

    • Fixed JavaDocs.

MoPub Kit

Doubling down on games: introducing Fabric for Unity

By Hemal Shah, Product Manager

Think back to the first game you ever played. Do you remember your high score or the feeling when you beat the level you spent all night trying to get past? We do too. For years, Twitter has helped game developers deliver amazing experiences through rich content and app distribution tools that drive discovery and conversation about your content.

Within the Fabric team, we want to double down on that support, and make it even easier to help you build, distribute, and monetize amazing games with best-in-class tools. That’s why today we’re thrilled to announce that Fabric now supports Unity, one of the most popular game development engines in the world.

 

Focus on building. We’ll help take care of the rest.

In building Fabric for Unity, we worked with hundreds of amazing game developers and learned that a wide variety of teams are facing many of the same challenges:

  • building a stable game for every user
  • surfacing metrics that matter
  • acquiring more customers
  • generating revenue

As we set out to build Unity support for Fabric, we wanted to bring our award-winning SDKs to game developers that leverage the Unity engine. We crafted a streamlined onboarding and update experience through one unified Unity plugin that would give you time back each week to focus on building your game.

Integrated straight in your Unity IDE, there are no extra steps required when you want to install or update any of our SDKs. We know that you're comfortable in your IDE, so with Fabric, you never have to leave it.

With Fabric, the idea of a single tool that will not take long to implement but give us a broad reach in terms of capabilities in Unity, is a huge offering.


A great game starts with a stable base. Using Crashlytics, the #1 crash reporting tool, you get the best of iOS and Android crash reporting to your native and C# code. We perform a deep analysis of each stack trace to identify the most important frames so you can see the exact cause of the crash and immediately address the issue.

Crashlytics was integral to the development of our hit mobile games Star Trek Timelines and Game of Thrones Ascent, and vital to the live operations of both titles. The detailed crash data empowers our engineers to quickly drill down on specific issues, and the visualization tools provide product managers and producers a clear picture of how our crash metrics shift with each new game update. A minimal crash rate means happier players, and Crashlytics is our tool for achieving that goal!



We also know that game analytics can be a hassle. With every chart, graph and filter imaginable, finding the data you need can be time-consuming. Having real-time insights about what your customers are doing in your app will save you time and overhead costs. That’s where Fabric comes in.

Answers, part of the Fabric suite of tools and seamlessly integrated with Crashlytics, is a perfect match for game developers. Out of the box, it has events that match directly to your game milestones, including:

You can even log any custom event for the unique situations and player scenarios your game has. Our analytics support for Unity gives you the easy wins when it comes to getting the most important metrics you need to make key business decisions -- all in real-time. And with the Fabric mobile app, available on both iOS and Android, you can be notified about key stability and performance alerts on the go.

 

Unlock growth with Twitter – globally

Building a great game means attracting and retaining as many users as possible. As you know, you need to find the most efficient ways to get new customers excited and continue that emotional high for current users.

With Fabric, you can tap into the power of Twitter and attach rich photos, videos and other media experiences to Tweets that drive traffic to your website or app. Victories are sweetest when celebrated. Twitter provides a unique platform to let your players celebrate their triumphs in real time. The Twitter feed is live, public, and conversational; our tools give you the ability to make your game a part of that conversation. With Twitter through Fabric, you can create a way for players to quickly Tweet in a way that feels natural to your game.

To make sure you’re getting the widest and most effective distribution possible, you can even leverage Twitter’s mobile app promotion ecosystem.

Twitter was my virtual leaderboard. 100 percent of the initial discovery of my game came through Twitter because of the 'Tweet your score' button.



Build a business. Maximize ad revenue.

MoPub has been used by game developers since its inception five years ago to help maximize the value of ad supported games. The system offers a single, comprehensive monetization platform that can be seamlessly integrated through Fabric. You can take advantage of all the major ad formats in mobile to create a customized experience that fits naturally with the content of your game.

Our system gives you free ad serving for cross promotion or direct sales, free ad network mediation, and immediate access to over 175 demand partners through MoPub Marketplace, a leading real-time bidding exchange for mobile advertising.

From our friends at FEO Media:

Moving to MoPub for network mediation has been one of the most positive steps this year for the company; not only for increased revenue, but because of the additional controls and transparency.

 

The most seamless game development experience

Our passion is to build developer tools and services that make your life easy. For Unity, we set out to craft the most seamless plugin in the market. With just a few clicks you can easily onboard our kits into any Unity project. We’ve even built in a few extras that we think all Unity developers will appreciate:

  • Proper dependency management is baked in so you’ll have a hassle-free experience from conception to monetization.
  • Elegant notifications when your tools are out of date; we even automate the update process so when you’re ready, you can always ship the most up-to-date code.
  • Pain-free downloading and updating. No more removing files manually.

To get started, simply download and import the Fabric plugin into your project. We're excited to help you through your game development journey and can’t wait to hear what you think!

 

Fabric February Update

By Hemal Shah, Product Manager

For the past month, we’ve been focusing on customer love. Rather than giving our customers some of those awesome candied hearts, we spent our time shipping some things we knew would win your hearts.

Introducing the Fabric mobile app

Since we launched Fabric in 2014, our mission has been to make tools that let you focus on building the best apps. We heard from you that some of the most impactful crashes and performances updates don’t always happen when you’re in front of a laptop.

With the Fabric mobile app, it’s never been easier to know what’s going on with your app on the go. We sift through millions of events every day to intelligently give you the most important information.

See the original announcement here!

Full support for tvOS with Fabric

Over the past few months, we’ve made major enhancements to the Fabric platform, adding things like tvOS support for Digits and Crashlytics. In February, we wanted to be able to bring the power of Answers that you’ve come to know and love to tvOS as well! This includes instant visibility into critical performance metrics, such as DAUs, MAUs, and crash-free users — all in real time.

Read more on the Answers blog!

Introducing screengrab on fastlane: automating screenshots on Android

Taking app screenshots is a ton of work and a huge time sink. The process usually requires capturing the shots, making sure each one is lined up correctly, and then localizing them for your customers’ needs — not to mention, you have to do this on every device, for every language you support. With fastlane, we solved this for iOS with our snapshot tool, and this month we brought the same magic to Android with screengrab!

See the original announcement.

The most powerful and intelligent crash reporter

In February, the Crashlytics team released a dashboard feature that highlights significant and unique bits of information about particular issues with badges! Now after a new release, you'll easily be able to identify if you have any issues that stand out against the rest.

Read more on the Crashlytics blog.

 

Here’s our changelog:

Fabric Platform

  • iOS, OS X and tvOS

    • Fix: Corrects a bug that could prevent Multipart MIME encoding from succeeding if the payload contained a zero-byte file

    • Fix: Improved stability when running on OS X 10.7

    • Enhancement: upload-symbols tool is now bundled within the CocoaPod

    • Improves README for CocoaPod users

    • Improves handling of paths with spaces in them

Crashlytics Kit

Digits Kit

  • Coming soon!

Twitter Kit

  • Android

    • Fixed retrieving auth token when using OkHttp 2.3+

    • Added gif or duration badge to media view

MoPub Kit

fastlane wins “Outstanding Performance” in Fukuoka Ruby Award Competition

By Felix Krause, Founder of fastlane

When I started fastlane, I never imagined that I’d be so fortunate to work with a community so passionate about developer tools. Since fastlane joined Fabric a few months ago, we’ve been working on making fastlane a best-in-class automation toolset that developers love, on both iOS and Android. Part of this journey involved my participation in the 2016 Fukuoka Ruby Award Competition, where creators and innovators showcased the companies, apps, and services that they built with Ruby.

I’m honored to share that fastlane won the “Outstanding Performance” award!

fastlane uses advanced Ruby features, and even defines its own custom Ruby DSL, to offer highly optimized configuration files for mobile app developers. It’s a privilege to be celebrated by the creators of Ruby, and for fastlane, it’s a big stamp of approval to show that we’re building tools that have a real impact.

Congratulations to all the other award winners; it's great to see so much innovation happening around the world!

Unifying fastlane tools

By Felix Krause, Founder of fastlane

TL;DR — fastlane is moving to a mono repo, and there's no change for you!

For more than five years, I’ve been working as an iOS developer for various companies around the world. During that time, it became clear there was lots of room for improvement around mobile developer tools, especially the deployment of apps. Because of that, I started implementing little tools to help me automate tedious tasks like uploading metadata for release builds or generating screenshots. Each of those tools had no connection with each other and ran as standalone commands. About four months after the initial release of deliver, snapshot and frameit, I noticed one common theme: everyone using these tools developed their own shell scripts to trigger different deployment steps, pass on information, and ensure every step was successful.

I wanted to help developers connect all the tools they use into one, simple, unified workflow. I ended up building a very flexible and powerful tool called fastlane. fastlane defines a simple configuration file that allows every mobile developer to specify steps for the release process of their app. fastlane takes care of all the heavy lifting, like passing information between build steps, and ensuring each step is successful while using sensible defaults so you can focus on building a great app instead of the overhead to build and deploy.

Since the beginning, fastlane integrated with all the tools you already love, like CocoaPods, Slack, and xctool. Additionally, fastlane was designed to be as open as possible, allowing every developer to extend it to fit their needs. This was 🔑: within weeks, there was a passionate and growing fastlane community. Over 70% of all the fastlane integrations were contributed by amazing external developers. To this day, this number continues to amaze me!

But it didn’t stop there. After the initial release of fastlane, I published 10 new standalone tools, all tightly integrated with fastlane. As you can imagine, this added a lot of complexity to the fastlane architecture, especially the number of repositories and their dependencies. It resulted in confusion for users, as it’s unclear on how to contribute, where to submit issues and where to look up the documentation.

For example, here are some fun facts about fastlane:

  • fastlane has its own repo just to manage the other repos called “countdown”

  • The fastlane organization has over 30 GitHub repositories

  • I added 360 commits whose only purpose was to update internal dependencies between fastlane tools

As the community grows, the current architecture continues to cause confusion and overhead for both the end-users and the fastlane team. The last few weeks I’ve been busy working with the team to find a good solution, and I’m extremely excited for what we came up with.

Our goal to unify fastlane tools

As our community grew and we thought about how to make fastlane as amazing as possible, we wanted to think about a centralized way that would serve as the foundation for the future development of fastlane.

Our team created a main repo, and all fastlane repositories will be migrated to it. Each tool will be in a subfolder enabling you easy access to its source code.

With developers top of mind, we made this as seamless and hassle-free as possible. With this migration, you can still use all tools directly, so your setup will continue to work as usual. This should not break any existing setups and doesn’t require any action from your side.

Unifying fastlane means having one place for everything you need. Now, there will be one place to submit and search for issues on GitHub, one place for the documentation, one place to contribute to fastlane, and one tool to install.

We also want to be in a place to best help the fastlane community. Now, there will be less time spent keeping repositories in sync with tools like TravisCI, Rubocop, and GitHub settings.

We’ll be making this move within the next couple of weeks.

Our commitment to transparency

It was super important for our team to include the fastlane community in the process early and share these details before anything was done. In particular, we want the switch to be as flawless as possible without requiring any changes on your end.

With this change, I’m confident we’ve built a solid foundation for the future development of fastlane, so that we can move faster with new tools, features and ongoing support.

fastlane’s continued success is only possible thanks to including the fastlane community early in the process. I’m excited to see what the future of fastlane holds!

 

Introducing the Fabric mobile app

by Meekal Bajaj, Product Manager 

Since we launched Fabric in 2014, our mission has been to make tools that let you focus on building the best apps. Crashlytics and Answers have made it easy to see your app’s stability. But crashes don’t always happen when you are at your desk. And when time is of the essence, having the right context at your fingertips can make all the difference.

Today, we are thrilled to release the Fabric mobile app – your app’s heartbeat in your pocket.

The Fabric mobile app makes it easy for you to know what’s going on with your app. We sift through millions of events every day to intelligently give you the most important information. And starting today, our real-time alerting system will send you a push notification when something critical is affecting your app.

Keep a pulse on your app, even on the go

A few months ago our friends at Runkeeper, an app that helps runners track fitness, reached out to us with a problem: they had the least access to Fabric when their users were the most active – on weekends.

Runkeeper users are the most engaged then, making it the best time for the service to launch new promotions. To ensure that issues were triaged as soon as they happened, the Runkeeper team needed uninterrupted access to their dashboard, including weekends. With the Fabric app, the team can find out immediately when something critical is affecting their app via push notifications – no matter where they are.

From our friends at Runkeeper:

Having been using the Fabric mobile app since it was in beta, I know how connected our team will be once more start using it. Now, when I leave the office, I know that I can count on Fabric to send nudges when something critical happens to our app's stability. Because of that, our team will get tons of time back, and can truly deliver on the best customer experience for our users, no matter where we are.


Push notifications that matter

When you get a push notification from us, we’ll give you everything you need to know: full stacktraces, number of affected users, and breakdown of devices and platforms – all in real time. That way, even before you pull up your laptop, you know where to look for a bug, who on your team to reach out to and how it could affect your metrics.

If you have lots of apps, don’t worry: you won’t be bombarded with push notifications! With per-app settings, you control how much and how often you want to get notified about each app. We’ve even turned the frequency down by default so you will only receive notifications for high priority issues. And for those times you want to be uninterrupted or away from work, we’ve added a mute option.

We can’t wait for you to try it!

 

 

Introducing screengrab: automating screenshots on Android

By Hemal Shah, Product Manager

When Fabric partnered with fastlane four months ago, our goal was to give you the best deployment tools for your mobile apps. Since Twitter Flight, we’ve been making fastlane and its beta support for Android even more powerful.

Today, we're thrilled to share that we're introducing screengrab for automating screenshots on Android!

Automated, seamless, in your language of choice

A picture is worth a thousand words. Your screenshots need to reflect the best of your app's user experience, but taking perfect screenshots is a ton of work. The process includes capturing the shots, making sure each one is lined up correctly, and then localizing them for your customers’ needs. With screengrab, taking and uploading screenshots to the Google Play Store has never been easier.

Screengrab is entirely automated from the command line.

 

We’ve even made localizing your screenshots much simpler. By launching your app in multiple languages, screengrab allows you to verify that your localizations fit into labels on all screen dimensions in minutes.

Sitting on top of existing UI tests, screengrab connects with the rest of the fastlane toolset, streamlining the entire deployment process. You can prepare screenshots and then submit them to the Google Play Store with the rest of your app using supply.  Since screengrab is tightly integrated with fastlane, it’s super simple to integrate it into your existing workflow.

Set up once, run everywhere

Remember the last time you created screenshots for your app? It might have been as a preview to see what a recent change you made looks like, or for the design team for their latest mockup. Those tasks take time and energy away from what you really want to do: build awesome stuff. Setting up screengrab ensures no duplicate work is being done by your team. You can also stop putting the responsibility on one person who "just knows what to do." Once you've set up screengrab and checked in your config file, anyone on your team can generate screenshots with no additional steps required.

We built screengrab to give you your time back, making release day that much better. As an open source tool, we are excited to work with the community to build on this initial foundation and continually grow this tool!                                              

Fabric January Update

By Hemal Shah, Product Manager

Coming off Fabric’s biggest year yet, the team was excited to get back to work and continue building tools you love. In January, we kicked off 2016 by shipping major feature upgrades for fastlane and several kits on Fabric.

fastlane: tvOS support on Deliver and Scan

Since fastlane officially joined the Fabric team last fall, we've been heads down building out the service to make lives easier for even more developers, starting with the Apple TV. Now, you can use fastlane’s “Deliver” and “Scan” tools for your tvOS apps. Learn more or get started with fastlane here!

Answers Kit: Bringing the #1 mobile analytics tool to OS X

In January, the Answers team released Answers for OS X to help you keep a constant pulse on your OS X apps. Now, you have the same suite of powerful tools you’ve come to enjoy with Answers for iOS — all seamlessly working for your apps on Mac.

Read more in the Answers January Update.

Crashlytics Kit: Logging NSErrors

Over at Crashlytics, the team worked around the clock extending the #1 crash reporting experience to non-fatal errors on iOS. With the latest upgrade, you can easily log and fix the most prevalent crashes and non-fatals on Apple devices, all in real time.

Read more in the Crashlytics January Update.

Brand New Integration: Digits Kit + Answers Kit

Many of you have told the Digits team that having actionable insights over your user conversion funnel through Digits would be immensely helpful in growing your user base. With the new Digits Kit and Answers Kit integration, your team will now have visibility into how many of your customers are using Digits' simple onboarding flows — all in real time.

Read more in the Digits January Update.

GameAnalytics and PubNub Now Available on Fabric

In January, we were thrilled to announce that more partners, GameAnalytics and PubNub, have made their kits available on Fabric! You can install or update them with a single click. We take care of all the grunt work like provisioning your keys, so if you already have a GameAnalytics or PubNub account, you can easily onboard your app.

Read more in the original announcement!

Announcing the 2016 #HelloWorld Tour

At Twitter Flight, Jack Dorsey asked developers to give feedback and ideas on how we could enhance the Twitter platform, including Fabric, to better serve you. We’ve been listening to your comments — and now we want to meet more of you in person, learn more about what you’re building, and share the cool stuff we've been working on. 

That's why just a few weeks ago, the Twitter team announced an international #HelloWorld developer tour. We're super excited to help with this initiative, and we can’t wait to bring the tour to your city!

Interested in joining us? Learn more about the #HelloWorld tour here.

 

Here’s our internal changelog:

Fabric Platform

  • iOS, OS X and tvOS

    • Changed where Fabric preferences are stored on OS X, to comply with Mac App Store policies

Crashlytics Kit

Digits Kit

Twitter Kit

  • Android

    • Added basic photo viewer

    • Added custom controls for video playback

    • Enabled looping for animated gifs

  • iOS

    • Fixed logging bug

    • Fixed the include non-modular header import

    • Fixed right-to-left text Tweet text alignment

    • Fixed reload of timeline when image viewer is dismissed

    • Updated video support including auto-looping GIF and media type pill

    • Fixed for include non-modular header import

MoPub Kit

GameAnalytics and PubNub Kits now available on Fabric

By Jonathan Zazove, Product Manager

A little over a month ago we introduced the Appsee and Mapbox Kits on Fabric. These kits were among the eight new partners we announced at Flight to help you solve key challenges in mobile development.

Today, we're thrilled to tell you that two more partners, GameAnalytics and PubNub, have made their kits available on Fabric!

The best-in-class tools at your service

As with our earlier partner kits, those from GameAnalytics and PubNub offer tremendous value to developers using Fabric.

GameAnalytics: A powerful and flexible free analytics tool, that provides you with rich insights into your player’s behaviour. Improve everything from retention to monetization and add industry context by benchmarking your games’ performance against 5800+ others. Read more about GameAnalytics here.

PubNub: A secure global Data Stream Network (DSN) and easy-to-use API that helps their customers to connect, scale, and manage realtime applications and IoT devices. With over 70 SDKs for every platform, 250ms worldwide data transfer times, and scalability for hundreds of millions of devices, PubNub’s unique infrastructure offers the ability to easily connect and operate world-class realtime applications and IoT devices. Read more about PubNub here.

Seamless installation

Getting started with these SDKs has never been easier. On Fabric, you can install or update them with a single click. We take care of all the grunt work like provisioning your keys, so if you already have a GameAnalytics or PubNub account, you can easily onboard your app.

We couldn’t be more excited to get this into your hands, and we look forward to continue making Fabric even better in 2016!

Fabric's 2015 Year in Review

by Wayne Chang, Director of Product Marketing, Developer Platform

2015 was a year full of excitement and surprises: Apple made the stylus look sexy, Google released Marshmallow, giving developers even more control over the experience they’re bringing to Android customers, and we saw our first glimpse at hoverboards. We even passed the long-awaited “Back to the Future” day on October 21, 2015, where some Deloreans (maybe you saw one at Twitter Flight?) made an appearance.

Just over a year ago, we built Fabric, and set our sights high: to give developers best-in-class tools for building the best apps.

Let’s take a look back at the year in Fabric:

Introducing match on fastlane: solving code signing on iOS once and for all

By Hemal Shah, Product Manager

A little over a month ago, fastlane officially joined the Fabric team to help even more developers address pain points within mobile development. Since then, we’ve been heads down releasing tools and making enhancements to fastlane to make shipping apps even easier.

But one of the biggest pain points that has been an issue since day one of iOS mobile development, is the headache of code signing when working with teams.

That’s why we released match — a new tool that helps automate the code signing process.

Read more on the fastlane blog.

Appsee and Mapbox Kits Now Available on Fabric

By Jonathan Zazove, Product Manager

A little over a month ago, we introduced eight new partners to the Fabric toolset to help you solve key challenges within mobile development. We started out with installable kits for the Amazon, Stripe, and Optimizely SDKs. Since then, we've been working closely with the rest of the partners to build out their kits on Fabric:

As before, we want to give you access to the best-in-class developer tools without the typical frustrations that come with adopting new mobile SDKs. And today, we're thrilled that two more partners, Appsee and Mapbox, have made their kits available on Fabric!

The best-in-class tools at your service

With the Appsee and Mapbox kits, we believe each one brings immense value to developers using Fabric.

Appsee: Building an exceptional user experience requires both in-depth qualitative and quantitative understanding of your customers’ behavior. With Appsee's experience analysis platform, you can see exactly how people are using your apps with features like user recordings and touch heatmaps. Learn more about Appsee here.

Mapbox: Mobile has made geolocation and maps crucial to app customer experience, and implementing maps into your apps should be simple. Mapbox gives you the building blocks that make it easy to integrate location into any mobile app. Their Studio design suite allows you to design and style beautiful maps and satellite images. Learn more about Mapbox here.

Seamless installation

As with our Amazon, Stripe, and Optimizely kits, we'll automatically provision your keys so you can easily onboard your app if you already have accounts with Appsee or Mapbox. You can also install or update those SDKs with a simple click on Fabric.

When we release the rest of the partners’ (GameAnalytics, PubNub, and Nuance) kits in the coming weeks, we’ll update this post to let you know. Stay tuned!

Fabric November Update

by Wayne Chang, Director of Product Marketing, Developer Platform

Just last month we announced over 20 new features and upgrades to Fabric, and to Twitter’s developer toolset. In November, we continued to listen to your feedback to understand how we could make our tools even more powerful.

Introducing Crashlytics for tvOS, Enhanced Push Notifications for Beta

At Flight, we opened beta access to our crash reporting for tvOS project at Crashlytics Labs. Since then, we spent the month of November building out full support for Apple TV. Today, we’re thrilled to officially release Crashlytics for tvOS, along with an enhanced notification functionality for Beta by Crashlytics on Android.

Read more on the Crashlytics blog.

Introducing Digits for tvOS

In November, we were 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 on TV are cumbersome. That’s why today, we’re thrilled to introduce Digits for tvOS to help you solve this challenge, starting with Apple TV.

Read more on the Digits blog.

A New Launch Day Experience with Answers

For developers, there’s a lot of nervousness and pressure that surrounds big launches. Many of you wanted to be able to get a complete health status check and a quick glance at how their app was doing. That's why we spent November building out a new dashboard feature called Launch Day Experience, so you can get these answers at-a-glance!

Read more on the Answers blog.

Scaling Native Campaigns with MoPub

In November, we released OpenRTB 2.3 spec that brings DSPs new functionality to accompany the latest standards in mobile programmatic advertising. This new IAB spec brings standardization to help DSPs scale native campaigns across supply sources. The new spec also brings more transparency around performance to buyers by clearly articulating the difference between wins and clears in bid responses. Additionally, OpenRTB 2.3 has improved support for third-party impression tracking.

Read more on the MoPub blog.

A Brand New Tool Added to fastlane

Just last month we welcomed fastlane to Fabric, and since then, we’ve been heads down further enhancing its toolset. This month we’re excited to share a new tool: WatchBuild.

As the #iosprocessingtime varies from a few minutes to multiple hours, developers sometimes forget to check iTunes Connect to see if the build is ready. WatchBuild does that for you. WatchBuild is a simple tool that shows a notification once your newly uploaded build has been successfully processed by iTunes Connect. Also, it will automatically work with pilot and deliver within the fastlane toolset!

Here’s our internal changelog:

Fabric Platform

  • iOS

    • Avoid using NSURLSession on iOS 7, which exhibits some stability problems on that OS version.

    • Avoid using NSURLSession on iOS 7/OS X 10.9, which exhibits some stability problems on those OS versions.

Crashlytics Kit

Digits Kit

Twitter Kit

  • Android

    • Changed TweetView favorite actions to "like" hearts

    • Updated translations

  • iOS

    • Switched Favorite to Likes in Tweet views

    • Bug fixes for Tweet view height calculations

    • Expose convenient method for refreshing items in `TWTRTimelineViewController`

    • Tweet views in timelines now remember who the user is in the case of having multiple Twitter system accounts and will not prompt for login again after tapping like

    • Fixed crash when there is no logged-in user on system

MoPub Kit

Introducing Answers Kit

by Brian Swift, Product Manager

Today, we’re thrilled to officially release the Answers Kit — a standalone, installable Kit on Fabric for both iOS and Android.

With Answers as its own kit, you’ll have the flexibility to use Answers as a standalone service and get just the functionality you need. For app marketers and product managers, you can now leverage Answers by itself and its features like Audience Insights to be able to directly influence the impact you’re making on growth and revenue.

Read the full story on the Answers blog.

Welcoming fastlane to Fabric

By Hemal Shah, Product Manager

When we built Fabric last year, we set our sights high: to give developers best-in-class tools for building the best apps. So we’ve been heads down shipping upgrades, integrating with popular tools, and even sending a bus full of really smart people to meet developers all over the world.

Today at Flight, we were thrilled to welcome fastlane, the most popular deployment tool on iOS -- and now available on Android -- into the Fabric developer toolset.

iOS deployment: the way it should be

Shipping a new app or release build is often a cumbersome, repetitive process. On iOS, you need to test your app, take hundreds of app screenshots, build the app, tackle signing issues, prepare push certificates, upload your files, and finally… submit to the App Store. All of this can easily take up the whole day, or even weeks. Then came fastlane. 

Founded by Felix Krause, fastlane gives you a set of open source command line tools to unify and automate your entire iOS app deployment process, cutting your release time from weeks down to just hours. With 10 tools and 100+ integrations that are free, fastlane connects all these tools into a single and completely streamlined workflow.

Using fastlane, you don’t have to worry about any complicated commands. Just define your “lane”, specifying which tools to run in which order, and fastlane will take care of the rest. Getting started is also incredibly simple: just install the fastlane gem via command-line, and you’re off and running. Used by thousands of developers worldwide, we are ecstatic to include fastlane, a tool that developers love and respect, in the Fabric toolset.

Android deployment that’s completely streamlined

The vision for fastlane has always been to build a cross-platform, continuous deployment and integration tool that saves developers weeks of time in their release process. That’s why we’re excited to introduce fastlane for Android.

Now Android developers have access to the best open source command line tools to unify and automate your entire app deployment process to Google Play. fastlane sits right on top of Gradle and uses it as the build, test and dependency tool of choice, easily fitting into your existing workflow. We couldn’t be more excited to bring the same seamless experience from fastlane for iOS to Android. To learn more, check out Felix’s post.

The future of fastlane is secure

Now that fastlane is part of Fabric, Felix plans on making fastlane even more powerful. But don’t worry — everything in fastlane will still work as expected and will remain open source and completely free. We’re deeply committed to the future of fastlane. We’ve recently released the 1.0 versions of the open source fastlane tools, and we will continue to invest resources into integrating fastlane into the Fabric experience. We can’t wait for you to use it.

 


Introducing Eight New SDKs on Fabric

By Jonathan Zazove, Product Manager

Since launching Fabric last year, we’ve seen a number of other key needs within mobile development: scaling infrastructure, integrating payments, and running A/B tests, among others. We wanted to help solve these challenges by leveraging some of the best-in-class tools within the industry, and do that without the typical frustrations that come with the adoption of new mobile SDKs.

That’s why today we’re excited to introduce eight new partners that join the Fabric developer toolset:

 

Automatic sign-up

We thought long and hard about which problems developers had when integrating SDKs beyond those we focused on over the last year. We knew you’d rather spend time coding instead of filling out sign-ups and searching for keys to put in your app, and wanted to build something to help eliminate these tasks.

With Fabric, we'll automatically provision your keys for all of your Kits and onboard your app. Now you can sit back and focus on the fun stuff, like coding.

If you’re already using Fabric, you can now install the Amazon, Stripe, and Optimizely SDKs right within your Mac app or Android IDE plugins. Forget jumping through different repos or downloading installation packages from multiple places; Fabric does the heavy lifting. You can access all three SDKs in one place and be up and running in just a few minutes.

We're excited to make Stripe available on Fabric. Developers are designing and building products that will fundamentally change the world, and Stripe is the best way for them to accept payments. With Fabric, even more developers can use Stripe to fuel their growth by providing a seamless payment experience directly within their apps.


As with our core kits, you can upgrade your Amazon, Stripe and Optimizely SDKs to their latest version in one click within your Mac app or Android IDE plugins. We also recognized the experience our partners provide, and wanted Fabric customers to have that same first class experience. That’s why we’ve built support for popular dependency managers for both platforms. You spend less time managing your SDKs and more time building your app.

A/B Testing and Personalization can make or break a business. We’re excited to partner with Fabric because they understand the value in that,” said Wyatt Jenkins, VP of Product, Optimizely,”Optimizely and Fabric work seamlessly together so that developers can focus on what matters most: providing amazing optimized experiences for their users.


Right now, we’re rolling out the Amazon, Stripe, and Optimizely Kits to a number of current customers. In the coming months, we’ll work with partners to roll out their SDKs on Fabric with the same experience.

Here’s what our partner Nuance said, whose SDK is coming soon:

We’re thrilled to be working with the Fabric team to bring our Nuance SpeechKit to the Fabric toolset. With SpeechKit, implementing voice into apps will be easier than ever for developers, and we're excited to see how they use it to create new experiences for the Twitter community


Learn more about our partners and how they can help you build even better apps.

 

Fabric's core Kits: even more powerful

We haven’t neglected the Crashlytics, Digits, Twitter, and MoPub Kits that launched last year. We’ve been thrilled by the response from the community since then: Crashlytics was named the #1 most implemented SDK for performance and Answers was named the #1 most implemented SDK for mobile analytics on iOS; Digits has been implemented in some of the world’s top apps, including Vine and Periscope; MoPub is one of the world’s largest mobile ad exchange for developers on the market today. We’ve been busy upgrading these Kits with a slew of new features:

We’re excited about all these new SDK partners, Kit features and experimental projects, and we’ll have more to share once we open access to more partner Kits in coming months. Stay tuned!

 




The Fabric Experience. Reimagined.

by Hemal Shah, Product Manager

As we approach Fabric’s first birthday, we’ve taken some time to look back at what tools we’ve shipped that have helped you build the best apps. When we get together as a team to talk about what we want to build next, we always put developer value first: what kind impact will new tools have on your life every day? How can we take the developer experience to the next level?

Today, we’re rolling out three new upgrades that we hope do just that: a complete new form factor for Android; a brand new Mac app; and enhanced feature tutorials for all of our SDKs.

Fabric for iOS: A brand new Mac app

When we built Fabric for iOS, we developed a powerful desktop app on the Mac to help you onboard your apps and SDKs without having to leave your workflow. Since we launched Fabric last year, we've been listening to your feedback and modernized the Mac app experience to be even more seamless.

Instead of a drop-down window from the Mac OS menu bar, it can now be launched right from your dock, so it fits perfectly with the way you want to work on the desktop. We support the common ways you interact with your visual dev tools, like being able to CMD+tab to switch between looking at code in your project and setting up an SDK or a feature. It’s also dismissible in your dock, giving you total control for interacting with it in your work space.

We’ve made the onboarding experience even more fluid. You can now easily copy code and go through tutorials via bigger windows. You’ll also have up-to-date documentation for SDKs easily accessible with troubleshooting tips and recommended next steps so you can make sure you’re getting the most out of each feature. In the past, our Mac app ran in the background for dSYM uploads to ensure you were getting the latest updates. Now, we've made our run binary even more powerful: it submits dSYMs, making the Mac app a tool you need to call only when you need it. Being dismissible means it no longer has to be running constantly, even if you're building your app.

Fabric for Android: A whole new experience

To make our Android plugin feel even more integrated into the IDEs, we set out to focus on ways we could enhance the Android form factor. To do this we're bringing the same app or SDK onboarding experience you see on the new Mac app to your Android IDE plugin. Your plugin can live in different locations per your preference, so you can use it how you want. Now it’s even easier and clearer to see instructions as well.

It's now a resizable, draggable tool window and because of this, you can see longer lines of code in your IDE plugin.

Support for the future of Android

With the recent announcement Google made about ending support for Eclipse, after much thought, we've decided to discontinue future support for the platform as well. But don't worry! Although we’re no longer going to be rolling out any more upgrades to Eclipse, your existing plugin for Eclipse and dashboard will continue to work for the apps you’ve onboarded. For the new Android form factor upgrades just released, we’ll only roll them out to Android Studio and IntelliJ.

An integrated, intelligent SDK installer

When you onboard a new SDK, the the last thing you want is to jump through different repos integrating multiple packages or read endless pages of docs. With Fabric, you’ll have immediate access to an integrated, intelligent SDK installer right within your Fabric Mac app or Android IDE plugin. We’ve organized our SDKs into modular Kits so you can install or update them all with a simple click of a button. We’ll even walk you through how to get started with the core features right within your workflow!

To get these latest upgrades, simply launch your Fabric Mac app or Android IDE plugin and follow a few quick steps. This is just the beginning of the exciting features we’re building out. There’s much more to come as Flight approaches.

 

We also shipped a ton of other enhancements in September. Here’s our internal changelog:

Fabric Platform

  • Mac App

    • We’ve built an improved Mac app that fits perfectly with the way you want to work on your desktop.

    • Added the ability to dismiss your Mac app on the top of your dock

    • Added bigger and more pristine windows so you can easily copy code and go through tutorials

    • Made enhancements to give you the same powerful features like ability to upload dSYMs or detect and distribute beta builds

  • Android

    • We built a new form factor based of the IDE tool window. Now, you’ll be free to move your plugin wherever you want. It’s resizable, draggable; it fits even more seamlessly into your work space.

Crashlytics Kit

Digits Kit

Twitter Kit

  • iOS

    • Switched Tweet images to use HTTPS
    • Fixed issue in certain network errors leading to failure of refreshing guest tokens
    • Fixed issue where guest tokens were being activated excessively
    • Fixed issue of using iOS 8 API in OAuth form requests, which crashes iOS 7 users
    • Fixed issue where certain API client requests do not dispatch back to main as expected
    • Fixed issue where some OAuth `POST` URL requests sent were dropping parameters
    • New authentication stack for TwitterCore and TwitterKit
    • Fixed issue where `TWTRTweetView` was showing links that were not tappable
    • Fixed a crash on Landscape iPhone 6 Plus when tapping the Share button
    • Added `tweetView:didTapImage:withURL:` method to `TWTRTweetViewDelegate` protocol
    • Fixed issue where `TWTRTweetView` are crashing on iOS7 due to missing `-[super layoutSubviews]` call
    • Cleaning up cookies on logOut so users can log in as another user
    • Fix bug that made `TWTRTimelineViewController` not work with interface builder
    • Remove need to call `-[Twitter logInGuestWithCompletion:]`
    • Remove shared APIClient from Twitter and allow developers to create instances with specific user context

MoPub Kit