Twitter extends olive branch to developers: new SDKs and bridge building

22 Oct 2015

Twitter extends olive branch to developers

Twitter yesterday used the occasion of its Flight developer conference to rebuild bridges that were burned several years ago when the company entered hyper-growth mode by revealing a slew of new software development kits (SDKs) for developers.

Newly ensconced CEO Jack Dorsey told developers that the company wanted to “reset” relations with developers whom it had frozen out when it got protective of its brand and core products several years ago.

“Our relationship with developers got confusing, unpredictable,” Dorsey said. “We want to come to you today and apologise for the confusion.”

As a peace offering, Twitter revealed a number of kits and SDK alliances that should help developers who build apps around the Twitter platform to optimise those apps.

New tools and SDKs revealed at Twitter’s Fabric event

Among the tools revealed at Flight was Twitter Kit with built-in support for Unity game developers.

Twitter also added nine new SDKs to the Fabric developer platform it launched last year, including SDKs from Stripe (payments), AWS (cloud), Optimizely (A/B testing), SendGrid (marketing), Nuance (dictation), Appsee (analytics), GameAnalytics (analytics for mobile games), Mapbox (location services) and PubNub (data streaming).

Only time will tell if Twitter follows through on this promise to work better with app developers. But by not enabling developers to build apps around its platform such as games and other useful tools, it is clear that Twitter realises now it has been missing a big trick readily embraced by players like Apple and Facebook.

Peace bird image via Shutterstock

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com