A better way to sign in with Digits

Today, as a part of our Fabric announcement, we launched Digits — a new way for users to sign in to their apps and websites without using a password. Simple and safe to use, Digits requires only a phone number, and is free for developers and users.

We built Digits after doing extensive research around the world about how people use their smartphones. What we found was that first-time Internet users in places like Jakarta, Mumbai and São Paulo were primarily using a phone number to identify themselves to their friends. But until Digits, there has been no simple way for app developers to integrate phone-based sign-up and sign-in to your apps.

With Digits, we’ve created a simple sign-in solution for both developers and users.

 All users have to do is enter their phone number, and Digits will send a confirmation code to verify the number. There’s no need to remember complex passwords or usernames. To top it off, Digits won’t post on behalf of any social network.

During Flight, we also announced several other features that will ship later this year:

• Digits.com, an easy way for your users to manage their Digits accounts and enable two-factor authentication
• Digits Web APIs, making it easy for you to integrate Digits into your websites
• Friend Finding with Digits, so people can use their address books to find other Digits users in your apps that they know.

Each developer is in control with Digits. It lets you build your own profiles and apps, giving you the security of knowing your users are SMS-verified. When you use our Friend Finding features, we don’t share your users’ address book data with third-party apps. It’s backed by Twitter, safeguarding user accounts with the Twitter infrastructure. And finally, Digits is fully themable, and can be launched from any button anywhere in your app.

We began rolling out Digits, part of Fabric, today. Developers interested in Digits should visit dev.twitter.com/fabric to get access to Fabric and the Twitter Kit.