Twitter Kit and Digits for Android go open source

With a swarm of developers from around the world converging on San Francisco’s Moscone Center tomorrow for Google I/O, Twitter wants them to keep the company’s real-time social platform at the top of mind. This afternoon it announced that its developer tools for integrating Twitter into Android apps have been open-sourced, with the projects now hosted publicly on Github.

Using Twitter Kit developers can easily integrate several features into their apps that will benefit their users who already have Twitter accounts, including native tweet embeds, a tweet composer for sharing in-app content like a song or picture to the social network, and authentication using Twitter identity so users can skip creating yet another email and password combination and just use their Twitter credentials.

Digits, which used to be part of Twitter Kit but is now separate, is also being open-sourced with its own separate repository. For those who may not have a Twitter account but also don’t want to have to create an email and password combination, Digits allows users to create an account with a new service using only their phone number. Phone number authentication is becoming an ideal way to login to new services as the great attention switch to mobile continues where it’s slow and tiring to type out anything very long.

The benefit for developers of these two projects going open source is that they can now examine the code and report bugs or submit fixes as they arise. It’s for developers who want to use the tools and fix problems without having to wait and hope someone else gets around to it, and good for Twitter, who wants to offer a solid platform for which developers will want to build (and in turn make Twitter money).

Twitter Kit for Android was launched just over six months ago, and the new open source project is under a permissive software license. Check out the company’s blog post to learn more and find the repositories for both projects.