A New Direction for the Twitch Developer Rig

Today (January 17, 2019), we’re announcing the steps we’re taking to improve the way we build and deliver the Developer Rig. Our mission is to help developers build the best Extensions possible, and we believe we can better serve our customers by taking development fully in-house and moving the Developer Rig to a closed source model. The immediate outcome of this strategic decision is the native Developer Rig, which is currently in beta. The native Rig combines a number of technical, UI, and usability improvements, delivering a faster start-up and an improved user experience.

We put a lot of thought into these changes and we believe they will help developers in the following ways:

  1. We can create a more seamless experience between the Developer Rig and the devsite by enabling API calls throughout the Extension lifecycle.

  2. We can ship usability improvements by pinpointing UX issues in the Rig faster.

  3. We can better support different versions of the Rig. We will support a beta version that is the latest and greatest, along with a stable release build when we fully release to general availability.

  4. We can improve the security of the Developer Rig.

You can download the native Rig beta build for Mac and for Windows. We are targeting early February to provide a Linux build as well. We would love to get your feedback and you can do so in the following places: the #native-dev-rig-beta channel on the TwitchDev Discord, on the Twitch Developer Forums, or in the following user survey.

The Developer Rig repository on GitHub will move to “Read Only” today and will remain available in that state.

We greatly appreciate the contributions the community has made to the Developer Rig to date. We want to give a special shout out to the following developers in the community whose contributions have been shipped in the Developer Rig.

Thank you all and see you on Twitch!

Note - Edited to link the latest version of the Native Rig.

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