
Twitter launches Fabric mobile app for developers - growthhack
https://fabric.io/blog/introducing-the-fabric-mobile-app
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ropiku
FYI it's built using Swift and ReactiveCocoa. They put up all the dependencies
licenses in Settings so I made a list of the packages they use
[https://gist.github.com/ropiku/b259f35060a40eab1597](https://gist.github.com/ropiku/b259f35060a40eab1597).

~~~
bsaul
it's the second time this week i hear about reactive cocoa.I'm starting to
hate uikit with a passion, but what's so special about it ?

~~~
JSoto
iOS engineer who worked on the Fabric app here :) I gave a talk about this
topic at a Swift conference last year, if you wanna check that out!
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ent6LJDIB3I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ent6LJDIB3I)

~~~
st3v3r
Maybe you can answer who was the person that decided that your library was so
special that you have to use a damn application to add it to a project, rather
than use the same exact procedures to add a library that every other library
uses? No, I don't want to use your application to add the library, and no, I
don't want to have to go through the onboarding every single time I need to
add it or update it.

~~~
bsaul
i was really hesitant when i saw how fabric is supposed to be installed, using
a mac app, but i've got to admit that it's a really pleasant experience so
far.

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philipodonnell
In case anyone else was confused, Fabric is also the name of the CSS framework
from Microsoft for developing Office 365 add-ins.
[https://blogs.office.com/2015/08/31/introducing-office-ui-
fa...](https://blogs.office.com/2015/08/31/introducing-office-ui-fabric-your-
key-to-designing-add-ins-for-office/)

~~~
redwall_hp
It's also the name of a Python devops tool
[http://www.fabfile.org/](http://www.fabfile.org/)

~~~
dopamean
It's also the name of a rad nightclub in London.
[http://www.fabriclondon.com/](http://www.fabriclondon.com/)

~~~
morninj
It's also the name of a JavaScript HTML5 canvas library:
[http://fabricjs.com/](http://fabricjs.com/)

~~~
jhardcastle
It's also, most confusingly to me, the name of Facebook's datacenter design.

[http://www.techrepublic.com/article/facebook-fabric-an-
innov...](http://www.techrepublic.com/article/facebook-fabric-an-innovative-
network-topology-for-data-centers/)

~~~
zwarag
It's also the name of a brand selling yarn and buttons and stuff.

[https://www.fabric.com/](https://www.fabric.com/)

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micnguyen
I'm an iOS Developer working on a project that uses Fabric ad I -absolutely-
hate it. Maybe something is wrong with our integration, but I hate the fact
that any run of the XCode build runs the Fabric Mac app and you HAVE to have
it running, or else your XCode build fails. This doesn't help when your Fabric
app crashes sometimes or isn't seen by Xcode for some reason, so every now and
then my Chrome browser will just re-direct me to Fabric's website to download
the SDK and I'll have about 20 tabs open before force quitting & relauncing
the app. I like the idea of housing a lot of useful dev tools together, but
hate having such a large overhead around it to do so.

~~~
x1024
Same. Is it that hard to just ship a library via CocoaPods? Google do it,
Facebook does it. But nooo, Twitter is "speshul" and they just have to be able
to drop multiple folders in the root of my project.

~~~
ropiku
You can totally use CocoaPods to add and update Fabric
[https://docs.fabric.io/ios/fabric/cocoapods.html](https://docs.fabric.io/ios/fabric/cocoapods.html).
I'm not sure if this still requires the Fabric app but I didn't have issues
with it.

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wpietri
I confess I never trust an animal until I can see its mouth; until I know what
it eats, I can't be sure whether I'm dinner. So how does Twitter benefit from
this? Is it just hoping that people will use their ad platform?

Given Twitter's fickleness toward developers in the past I'm especially wary.

~~~
Guildpact
There is an article from wired that talks about it here
[http://www.wired.com/2014/10/twitter-fabric-
sdk/](http://www.wired.com/2014/10/twitter-fabric-sdk/)

Getting your company ingrained into a larger part of the app market has huge
benefits. Now if people aren't using the Twitter app, Twitter can track them
and get data from them if they use an app that relies on Fabric.

The benefit is purely integrating themselves with larger and more diverse user
bases.

~~~
wpietri
Huh. That article says basically what I said: "The payoff for Twitter will
come if it can get developers to embrace MoPub, its advertising product,
because it gets a cut of any ad revenue."

In which case, I'd be kinda skeptical. If the other tools are mainly loss-
leaders for advertising, then Twitter will be prone to limiting or canceling
them when the internal politics change.

Which is exactly what they did with API access previously: they cost money to
operate and weren't for the moment seen as directly beneficial, so what was
previously going to be free forever was suddenly cut back.

~~~
volaski
I agree. Personally I think it's a great tool, run by a wrong company. If some
other company--say Google, Microsoft, or even Amazon--acquired this I would
trust it 100 times more. This is not just because of their history of
betraying their own developer ecosystem but more importantly because Twitter
has never known (and still doesn't know) what they want to be (which in turn
was the cause of aforementioned betrayal). All that fluff on the Wired article
is just a fluff. Yeah sure you collect more data and sell it to advertisers to
make more money, but tomorrow they may find out that the model doesn't work so
well and may ditch it.

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dpflan
Does anyone currently use Fabric? And if so, have you moved on to integrate
MoPub Twitter-ad-network functionality? I'm curious how adoption has gone.

~~~
draw_down
Wondering the same, they've burned relations with devs pretty badly over the
years.

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adomanico
Twitter's mobile dev tools are fantastic. Love that they have this on iOS now.

~~~
meekalbajaj
:) thanks!

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RealCasually
Definitely a good start. I'm hoping they add Answers integration to the app
quickly as that is one of the more impactful Fabric uses for us.

~~~
meekalbajaj
Hey! I am the PM on the Fabric app. Answers is a key part of our app and
powers the top level charts, as well as our stability alerts. Would love to
hear more about what other data from Answers would be the most helpful to you
:)

~~~
RealCasually
Thanks for reaching out! I'm specifically looking for certain events. For
example, I use Answers to send a custom event each time a user does XYZ within
the app. I'd love to be able to see those charts and high level figures from
the app.

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6841iam
How does one get Audience Insights? The FAQ says: In order to protect the
privacy of users, we only show this data when it exceeds a minimum size.

Does anyone know what the minimum size is?

[https://fabric.io/kits/android/answers](https://fabric.io/kits/android/answers)

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nickpsecurity
Not to be confused with...

Fabric - A platform for secure distributed computation and storage
[https://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/papers/fabric-
sosp09.pdf](https://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/papers/fabric-sosp09.pdf)

[https://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/fabric/](https://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/fabric/)

From the place that brought us practical, cutting-edge security like JIF, SIF,
SWIFT, and CIVITAS. Link below gets you to most of that:

[https://www.cs.cornell.edu/jif/](https://www.cs.cornell.edu/jif/)

Then there's this Fabric which probably has different security properties. ;)

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spun
I beta tested the mobile app, great tool for keeping an eye on stats/crahes.
Highly recommended.

~~~
meekalbajaj
Thanks for all your help :)

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cm3
For someone who doesn't do mobile development, what is this and how's Twitter
involved?

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andypiper
Fabric is Twitter's mobile SDK and platform.

~~~
cm3
I thought Twitter banned external applications years ago. Or is this some SDK
they use for their own mobile apps and have now shared with the developer
community?

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dennisnedry
Still not sure what it does - provides monitoring, analytics, and a nice UI
for cocoapods?

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trevor-e
Doesn't seem like you can look at issues? There's an activity section that
shows comments, and from there you can look at the related issue, but not view
all of them.

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faizmokhtar
This is great. I don't have to frequently opened Fabric.io page to see the
stats anymore.

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magikbum
Follows the launch of the Flurry App last week:
[http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/18/yahoos-flurry-unveils-
rede...](http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/18/yahoos-flurry-unveils-redesign-
launches-analytics-apps-and-apple-tv-sdk/)

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myohan
Is this for statistical debugging as well?

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almabts
Good to Know that. Thanks!

