Google has Acquired Fabric, Twitter’s Mobile App Developer Platform
Crashlytics was founded in 2011, but was acquired by Twitter at the start of 2013. The team continued to work out of Boston, Massachusetts and had an SDK that was used in over 1 million applications. They developed software that enabled iOS, Android and Unity developers to pinpoint the reasons why their applications were not stable (down to the exact line of code in some cases). By the end of 2016, it was announced that their software had been installed on over 2 billion active devices.
Almost two years after Twitter acquired Crashlytics, they announced Fabric. This was their expansion into mobile application analytics, beta distribution, and also user identity and authentication. We have talked about the project on multiple occasions here at XDA, and Fabric had become quite popular within the mobile developer community. This was Crashlytics’ first introduction of a modular SDK platform for the company. The modular functionality allowed developers to pick and choose which features they needed.
It’s fair to say that Twitter hasn’t had the best revenue stream over the last few years. As the company tries to reorganize their business model so they can become more streamlined, we’re seeing them cut back in certain areas. This was a big reason why they chose to turn Vine into a simple camera application recently. Since Twitter doesn’t feel Fabric plays a vital role in their social platform, they have been in talks to sell the technology along with the team to Google.
The team behind Fabric will now work under Google’s Developer Products Group and they’ll be working directly with the Firebase team. Both teams have a goal to help developers build better applications as well as helping them grow and scale their business too. We’ll have to wait and see what the end goal of this acquisition is. Whether or not Google will let Fabric continue to function independently, or if they simply want to fold the technology into Firebase.
Source: Fabric
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