Twitter Wants To Help You Build Your Own Mobile Apps

Mobile App Playbook is a new blog series by Twitter that’s designed to help users build apps, from the early design stages through to the final product.
Twitter is in the spotlight this week for much more than just hashtags and 140-character statements. As a leader in the tech industry the social media giants are branching out to provide other useful tools for their users, and its new blog series entitled “Mobile App Playbook” details its latest move.
Twitter hasn’t seen the growth that competing social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram have over the last couple of years, but they have absolutely made their mark on the tech industry. Twitter is a silicon valley giant that employs some of the world’s most talented engineers and designers. It’s also a major vehicle for discussion of global news in real time, and has in fact broken several stories in its decade of existence.
With Twitter having such a strong tech background, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that the company is attempting to help developers and designers get a firm grasp on the process of building mobile applications on their own. It’s not the first time Twitter has made innovative waves; in October of 2014, it introduced a new modular mobile platform called Fabric. Fabric was an instant success for Twitter as it became a stable toolkit for app developers to implement in their designs. After Twitter acquired Vine and Periscope, it continued to develop the existing apps in-house by using tools from Fabric.
In addition to expanding with Vine and Periscope, Twitter has also used its own Fabric platform to develop two entirely new apps: Cannonball and Furni. These apps were created and open-sourced on GitHub to invite collaboration and get feedback from other developers.
Now that Twitter has a handle (pun intended) on the framework, it’s releasing a new series of instructional blog posts that will walk readers through the process of building an app. The blog post will also feature Cannonball and Furni, the two apps built using Twitter’s own Fabric. This will make it easy for readers to follow along with real life examples.
This new “playbook”, as Twitter calls it, will feature tips surrounding the tools and processes used when Twitter developed Cannonball and Furnie. In the first blog post, it says:
“We don’t pretend to have all the answers, and you certainly don’t have to use all the tools we mention – but we’d like to pay it forward, based on knowledge we’ve gathered from colleagues and learned by making mistakes.”
In other words, Twitter is sharing its process of app building with the world. In such a rapidly growing industry, there is a high demand for those who can contribute to building real-world applications. Whether it’s starting with a rough framework, creating a UX design or coding the backend of the app, there’s something for everyone to learn in the Twitter’s “Mobile App Playbook”.
Since this is Twitter we’re talking about, it’s no surprise that they’re asking for input from users. If you have tips on how to contribute to the project, Tweet these using the #MobileAppPlaybook hashtag. Twitter will gather suggestions for future posts.
The first post in the series covers the beginning stages of app development, starting with prototyping and design, and then leading into starting with a stable foundation. Check out the building blocks of building an app by checking out Twitter’s Mobile Playbook.

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