News

Twitter Launches Mobile App for Tracking Analytics

• By David Ramel
• March 2, 2016

Twitter has launched a mobile app that helps developers on the go monitor the performance and stability of their own mobile apps.

The Fabric mobile app incorporates functionality from the company's Fabric mobile app development platform, which features a Crashlytics kit, for identifying and dealing with problems, and Answers, for tracking promoted and organic app installs driven by Twitter.

"Today, we are thrilled to release the Fabric mobile app -- your app's heartbeat in your pocket," Twitter said in a blog post last week. "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."

Twitter said the idea for the Fabric app came from customer Runkeeper, which provides fitness apps. Runkeeper developers wanted a way to keep track of their apps during weekends -- when they saw the most usage, but also when developers weren't at their desks.

"Runkeeper users are the most engaged then, making it the best time for the service to launch new promotions," Twitter said. "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."

According to Runkeeper, the project was a success.

"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," the company quoted Runkeeper exec Mike Oliver as saying. "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 are key to the process, and the app lets developers dictate how often they want to be notified of events. The notifications provide full stacktraces, information on the number of affected users, and an overview of relevant devices and platforms. Armed with that information, alerted developers can quickly jump on a laptop and address issues immediately, Twitter said.