Twitter says it’s now juggling about 5 billion “sessions” a day on its Answers service, the tool it released this past summer in an effort to help the world’s software developers analyze the performance of their mobile apps.
In other words, the company says, developers are using the seven-month-old service to collect app data from hundreds of millions of mobile devices out in the real world.
Answers is part of a larger suite of tools for software developers, known as Fabric, that Twitter formally unveiled at its inaugural developer conference in October. With Fabric, the company aims to help improve the performance and design of mobile apps—and perhaps integrate its own services into the larger world of computing. The suite, for instance, offers a tool for syndicating tweets through third-party apps.
“We want to empower the mobile app ecosystem for everyone,” says Brian Swift, who helps oversee the Answers tool. “We want to make these tools available for free—and make them as easy to us as possible.”
Answers is, in some ways, based on a tool called Crashlytics, which helps developers determine what’s causing their apps to crash. Twitter acquired Crashlytics in early 2013, and as Swift puts it, the company used many of the same principles in building Answers, which helps developers analyze how their apps are performing in others ways.
The aim is to help developers understand how people are using apps, how quickly these audiences are growing, and what the can be done to improve how the apps operate. Swift stresses that Answers is not just about gathering data, but learning how to respond to this information. “We’re providing you with a layer of opinion and analysis on your data,” he says, “so you can quickly take action.”
The app competes with similar tools such as Google Analytics and Flurry. But the larger aim here is for Twitter to expand its role beyond its own services and into apps across the software world. Ex-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer once hailed “developers, developers, developers” as vitally important to the success of his company, and the same goes for other giants of the tech world, from Google to Facebook to Twitter.
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