Mobile App Playbook: Lessons Learned
Our mobile app playbook series features tips on the tools and processes we’ve learned in building mobile apps.
Table of Contents
- Part one: prototyping and design
- Part two: start with a stable foundation
- Part three: accounts and social login
- Part four: creating a backend to manage services, data, and identities
- Part five: adding data from third-party APIs for fun and profit
- Part six: making money from your mobile app
- Part seven: app marketing for developers
- Part eight: progressive improvements and testing
- Part nine: analytics and what to track
- Part ten: streamlining your workflow
We know firsthand that it’s hard to build successful iOS and Android apps. We’ve built quite a few: the Twitter app itself, and also lots of apps and samples written from the ground up with no Twitter internal systems or tooling. And of course we’ve learned a lot about how our partners build apps and tackle problems.
At this year’s Flight conference, we showed off the power of some of the new features from Fabric, with two apps that we created and open-sourced on GitHub: Cannonball, a magnetic poetry game, and Furni, a mobile-first furniture store. Building these apps has been exciting, and educational. Moving from ideation to product on a (very) small team, we got a lot of assistance from others, and from tools available through Fabric.
Our experience building Cannonball made it so much easier to build Furni the following year. We thought we’d organize what we’ve learned into a chronological playbook that you can use as a guide when you build apps. Over the coming weeks, watch for our series of posts with tips on the tools and processes that we’ve learned.
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.
Jump to part:| Intro | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |