How iOS 5’s Twitter integration killed friction and blew up Discovr’s sharing stats

With the introduction of iOS 5, Apple integrated Twitter throughout the platform, enabling single sign-on, seamless Tweeting of photos and more. One of the byproducts of this was that an iDevice user can sign in to the service once, then have access to it in any app.

This means that any developers that took advantage of the features can lower the amount of friction inherent in making people sign-in to Twitter when sharing from their app.

Discovr is a pretty fantastic music discovery and sharing app for iOS that we covered earlier this year. It allows you to find and share cool new music.

The potential of this new Twitter integration was not lost on the developers of Discovr, and they integrated the single sign-on and iOS 5 ‘Tweet sheet’ features in their app in their latest release.

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When they did, they saw an immediate and dramatic indication that iOS 5’s Twitter integration greatly decreased the ‘friction’ (a term used to describe how difficult it is for a user to perform an action) of the sharing process.

In the app, you can choose to share a song with your Twitter followers. A before and after shot shows the difference between the version of the app that takes advantage of the integration and the one that doesn’t.

With the newer, sleeker sharing method, Discovr saw a huge bump in Twitter shares, while seeing shares via Facebook remain fairly steady. Nearly 80% of the shares that it saw were coming from iOs 5 devices.

Stuart Hall of Discovr closes out the post by urging developers who have not begun using iOS 5’s Twitter sharing integration in their apps to do so, saying that “no login=less friction=more shares=winning”. You can’t argue with the results.

For more information about Twitter integration, check out our guide to Twitter in iOS 5 here. If you’re a music fan, you should also check out Discovr on the App Store here.