Twitter has bought a mobile platform called OpenBack as it seeks to improve notifications and keep people coming back to its app. “OpenBack and their talented team joining Twitter will help us improve our ability to deliver the right notifications at the right time, in a way that puts people’s privacy first,” Twitter’s head of consumer product Jay Sullican wrote.
2/ The best push notifications bring people to the conversations they care about on Twitter. But irrelevant notifications are a distraction. With millions of people visiting Twitter via notifications every day, we want them to be timely, relevant and engaging.
— Jay Sullivan (@jaysullivan) April 12, 2022
OpenBack is used by mobile apps to process data on-device rather than on a server, Twitter said. The company’s approach to push technology is centered around privacy and offers an enhanced user experience, it added. Twitter’s hoping the OpenBack team will help it to improve notifications in order to alert folks to the right content at the right time, and get them involved in conversations they care about.
The current OpenBack business will be wound down. Its developers are joining Twitter’s Bluebird product team. Twitter declined to share terms of the deal.
The goal, of course, is to increase users’ level of engagement with Twitter, which will help it generate more revenue. The company’s revenue grew slower than expected in the last quarter of 2021. Its total revenue in 2021 was just over $5 billion. The company is hoping to increase that by 50 percent by the end of 2023.
Getting current users to use Twitter more often by drawing them in with more relevant notifications should help improve the bottom line. If Twitter can enhance notifications the way it wants to, it may also bring back some lapsed users who still have the app installed on their phone.
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