News

Twitter Brings Android SDKs Up To Par with iOS

• By David Ramel
• August 16, 2016

Twitter Inc. announced updated developer tools for Android, some five months after first introducing them for iOS.

The SDKs for Twitter Kit and Digits for both platforms are now at version 2.0. Twitter Kit and Digits (then a part of the Twitter Kit SDK) were introduced last year when the company combined several SDKs into one offering called Twitter Fabric, comprising several SDK "kits." The iOS SDKs for Twitter Kit and Digits were updated in March.

Twitter Kit helps developers provide interactivity with the social media platform within apps, such as log-ins, displaying tweets or generating tweets. "Twitter Kit offers pre-built views for single tweets or live timelines, and a composer that makes sharing from your app a matter of adding just a few lines of code," its site says.

Digits provides identity functionality such as user verification through the use of phone numbers. "Digits is a free, white labeled solution for verifying your users through their phone numbers -- without the headache of passwords," its site says. "Digits can be styled to look and feel like the rest of your app, and simplifies the complex process of SMS-based authentication."

Both Twitter Kit 2.0 and Digits 2.0 support Android OS versions 14 and greater.

Twitter said it has refined its libraries based on user feedback, aiming to enhance performance and better align them with modern Android tools.

"As part of the overhaul, we've updated major underlying dependencies: Retrofit goes from v1.x to v2.x, and with it comes v3.x of the OkHttp library that handles networking," Twitter said in a blog post last week. "That brings a fast, reliable, and updatable HTTP client to the core, with support for HTTP/2. This means faster and more efficient networking when talking to our APIs, while being more aligned with the modern libraries you're already using in your app.

"Updating these dependencies has also allowed us to rewrite some significant pieces of code to make Twitter Kit and Digits better: we've revised our networking stack, and Guest Auth tokens are now automatically refreshed for you. Both Twitter Kit 2.0 and Digits 2.0 also up our base version from Android API 9 to API 14, moving with the times as we've seen usage of these older Android releases dwindle. 2.0 also removes legacy functions that were previously deprecated."

The company will reportedly let developers use 1.x versions of the SDKs for the next three months, only updating them with critical bug and security patches.