“This is an entirely new native mobile sign up service that makes mobile-first sign-up frictionless, and creates an identity relationship entirely between you and your users,” said Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, speaking at the Twitter Flight developer conference in San Francisco today.  “We power it – we make it easy for you to communicate with your users – but that identity relationship is between you and them, not some third party. We power it and then we get out of the way.”  Twitter is able to provide this service because it has relationships with almost every major mobile operator on the planet. This means that users can post to Twitter from pretty much any country in the world by simply sending a text message to their Twitter account.  While Snapchat and WhatsApp have got ahead of the game by making their own SMS deals with mobile operators for identity verification purposes, Digits allows developers to leverage Twitter's existing distribution network, making the whole process quicker and less expensive.  Digits is just one of feature of Twitter's new mobile development platform, called Fabric, which aims to give developers a comprehensive toolkit for developing apps that integrate with Twitter. The technology will be available in 216 countries and 18 languages, and will be free for developers to use.  This also includes a new syndication tool, that makes it easier for app developers to embed filtered streams of tweets in their apps and web pages, and new crash-reporting tools from Crashlytics – a company that Twitter acquired in January.  Mobile-focused ad exchange MoPub, which Twitter acquired last year, has also been integrated into Fabric, allowing app developers to take images and text elements supplied by advertisers and format them so that they integrate better with their own content, making the ads less intrusive for the user.  App developers do not have to use all of the features of Fabric; they can pick the features they want and display them on a dashboard, giving them a high level view of how their app is performing and how it is being used.  McDonalds, Wall Street Journal, Spotify and Jawbone's Jambox are all already using aspects of the Fabric mobile development platform to improve the performance and enhance the capabilities of their iOS and Android apps.  “What we’re announcing today has been forged from components that are already in use across a spectrum of apps, servicing more than one billion iOS and Android users around the world,” said Costolo.  In the UK, 11.4 million people accessed Twitter at least once per month on a mobile phone in 2014, according to eMarketer – or 84 per cent of all UK Twitter users. In the US, that figure is 40.7 million, also reaching 84 per cent of US Twitter users.  Twitter accounted for 0.7 per cent of UK digital ad revenues in 2013, and is expected to reach 1.3 per cent market share this year. Digital advertising totaled £6.3 billion in the UK in 2013, and eMarketer estimates it will increase to £7.25 billion in 2014.
Twitter has announced a new service called Digits that allows users to login   to mobile apps using their mobile phone number alone