Is it safe to follow Fabric's instructions for integrating TwitterKit into an iOS project?

Question

EDIT: this question is outdated - TwitterKit is now available via CocoaPods

It seems to involve downloading an application, giving that application the path to my project, and adding one of their executables as a build phase.

It seems like that requires placing a lot of trust in Fabric...

Is there a good reason they're not providing the option to download TwitterKit in a more standard way, like a framework or a cocoapod?

Answer 1

Great question, the short answer is that we built the application to reduce friction when implementing any of the kits (TwitterKit, Crashlytics and MoPub).

Longer answer - there are various reasons for the Fabric application vs a "native" implementation. Currently the Fabric application provides a bunch of functionality that reduced friction for folks trying to implement any of the kits (ie Crashlytics, Twitter and MoPub). On the Crashlytics side we do a variety of things like take the dsym to replace the symbols in the crash logs with the appropriate methods names so crash reports are readable (also this makes it v.easy to provide a linkage between accounts, without the need for a key variable in the code). On the TwitterKit side it's fairly similar story, rather than take measures to get your keys/secrets from apps.twitter.com you can simply use the application that does some heavy lifting.

You can rest assured that the team isn't trying to do anything shady here. Feel free to reply here if you have any questions :-)

Answer 2

You are also free to download Twitter Kit as a CocoaPod: https://cocoapods.org/pods/TwitterKit

Just add the following to your Podfile : pod 'TwitterKit`