Introducing friend-finding and two-step verification to Digits

By
Tuesday, 3 March 2015

We’re making a couple of updates to Digits today: adding friend-finding to help you grow your audience, and introducing two-step verification.

Digits is the simplest way for users to sign up and sign in to your app and website. Since every app is different, many of them need their own social graphs to provide a differentiated experience to win users over. While social networking services give you the full list of your users’ friends, those connections may not be up to date or relevant to the app experience you’re delivering. On the other hand, contact lists on your users’ phones have the strongest, most current connections – but it can be cumbersome to build custom code to import those lists and match the contacts to create a social graph.

Now, with friend-finding, you can seamlessly create your own social graph with your users’ contact list. Digits will match both mutual or one-way connections so users who are already on the service will know immediately which of their contacts are also using your app, and they can also be alerted when a friend joins later.

Introducing friend-finding and two-step verification to Digits

Creating connections within your app is the most obvious benefit of friend-finding, but it can be used to improve the experience your app offers in a lot of other ways. For example, you can use these contacts to personalize the content in your app, like showing what their friends have bought, or the highest level they’ve achieved to incite “friendly” competition.

By delivering an experience fit for the individual user, you can increase the adoption of your app and retention among your user base. New users will know immediately which of the people they know best are using your app and current users can be ambassadors for the new initiates. It’s worth noting too that the social graph users create in your app with Digits will not be shared with other third-party apps, and the service is opt-in for users – it won’t interrupt the simple sign-up Digits offers.

In today’s update, we’re also enabling two-step verification. Delivering a secure experience to your users is important. Phone-based login is more secure than traditional email or social-based login – and two-step verification takes it a step further. After you’ve implemented Digits, your users can login to Digits.com and set-up a simple code which will be prompted on future logins and signups in all your Digits-powered apps. Introducing friend-finding and two-step verification to Digits

No matter what kind of apps you’re building, Digits will help you scale globally and give your users a more engaging – and secure – experience.

Get Digits at get.fabric.io by downloading Fabric and installing the Twitter Kit. If you already have Digits, see our Android or iOS docs for a complete walkthrough on implementing friend-finding and two-step verification. 

We want to hear about what you’re building and are happy to answer your questions. Reach out to us through @digits.