Twitter acquires Lightwell

Twitter’s ongoing, long-term efforts to make conversations easier to follow and engage with on its platform is getting a boost with the company’s latest acquihire. The company has picked up the team behind Lightwell, a startup that built a set of developer tools to build interactive, narrative apps.

Lightwell says that its toolset, which previously required a subscription, will be made available for free this week as part of the acquisition. Users won’t need to login or create an account, and they’ll be able to layout, prototype, and export to iOS without a plan. Published apps built with Lightwell won’t be affected, but the team notes that it’ll no longer actively support or add new features to Lightwell.

In recent months, Twitter has redoubled its efforts to make conversations among users easier to follow on its platform — and less toxic. Within its invite-only prototype mobile app, Twitter, it’s implemented new visuals intended to make replies more distinguishable from strung-together tweets, along with timelines connecting replies to other users within larger threads.

The company Hullabalu developed Lightwell software to create an original story series for children called The Adventures of Pan, which became a top seller in over 38 countries and racked up millions of downloads. Lightwell enables designers to create and ship animations across devices without developers having to recreate them by hand in Apple’s Xcode development environment, with support for properties like ambient motion, rotation, layout constraints, and scroll views as well as screen transitions and audio mapping.