News

Google to Buy Twitter's Fabric, Crashlytics Mobile Dev Tools

• By David Ramel
• January 18, 2017

Google today announced it's buying core components of Twitter's Fabric development platform, including the popular Crashlytics kit for mobile app analytics.

Earlier this month, Fabric shined in a report detailing the top iOS mobile SDKs, in which several of its components -- including Crashlytics -- fared at or near the top in categories such as stability, analytics and app monetization.

Now most of those popular components -- including Answers (for real-time app statistics) -- will join Google's Developer Products Group, working with the team that develops the company's Firebase mobile and Web application platform that provides back-end services for mobile apps and other services.

"As a popular, trusted tool over many years, we expect that Crashlytics will become the main crash reporting offering for Firebase and will augment the work that we have already done in this area," Google's Firebase team said in a blog post today. "While Fabric was built on the foundation of Crashlytics, the Fabric team leveraged its success to launch a broad set of important tools, including Answers and Fastlane. We'll share further details in the coming weeks after we close the deal, as we work closely together with the Fabric team to determine the most efficient ways to further combine our strengths. During the transition period, Digits, the SMS authentication services, will be maintained by Twitter."

MoPub (for app monetization), Gnip (an enterprise API platform) and the Publisher Platform (including Twitter Kit) aren't being sold. (Note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that MoPub was being sold and didn't specify that only the core components were being sold.)

Twitter's Fabric team complemented the Google announcement in its own blog post. "When we met the team at Google we quickly realized that our missions are the same -- helping mobile teams build better apps, understand their users, and grow their businesses," the Fabric team said. "Fabric and Firebase operate mobile platforms with unique strengths in the market today. We're excited to combine these platforms together to make the best mobile developer platform in the world for app teams. Fabric customers: there's no action you need to take in order to keep using these products. You can preview the new terms of use that will apply when the transaction is closed."

Developers can check out a preview of the terms of service for Fabric, Answers, Crashlytics and Beta Tester here. (Fastlane, an app deployment tool, is also included in the sale.)

Twitter announced Fabric in October 2014, noting at the time that the Crashlytics kit -- which it acquired by buying the Boston-based company named Crashlytics in January 2013 -- identified more than 5.5 billion crashes in the previous 30 days.

According to Wikipedia, at the end of 2016, Fabric served more than 2 billion active devices, processing 310 billion app sessions per month.

"The integration of Fabric is part of our larger, long-term effort of delivering a comprehensive suite of features for iOS, Android and mobile Web app development," Google's Firebase team said in today's blog post.

"This is a great moment for the industry and a unique opportunity to bring the best of Firebase with the best of Fabric. We're committed to making mobile app development seamless, so that developers can focus more of their time on building creative experiences."