The Twitter mobile app development platform Fabric has now changed hands to Google. Twitter sold the platform to the tech giant in order to cut costs and focus better on its other activities for the year.
Along with the acquisition of Fabric, Google will also get to take over operations for Crashlytics, Answers mobile apps analytics, Digits SMS Login system and FastLane development automation system. According to a report made by TechCrunch, Twitter wanted to cut off its non-essential sectors like it did with Vine. Running the popular SDK apparently cost the company a lot of money. Now that Google will be doing that bit, Twitter can save on their budgets by pushing money towards their Ads APIs, platforms like TweetDeck, Twitter Kit, Gnip and other public APIs.
Fabric was first taken over by Twitter in 2013, as a tool for developers to create better mobile-apps that were more responsive. Luckily, the developers won’t be needed to contribute to any of the transitioning. Fabric will now be a part of Google’s own Firebase platform and Crashlytics will be the main crash reporting tool that they expect to use for their development because of how effective and reliable it’s had a reputation of being.
According to VentureBeat, Fabric has been active on over 2.5 billion active mobile devices, supporting more than 580,000 mobile app developers. Twitter however, hasn’t had a great 2016 despite having such a celebrated resource. Last year, the company lost $103 million in its third quarter. Twitter wasn’t the only one that had to sell off a part of its core projects. Facebook had to shut down their very own Parse development platform for the same reasons.
It’s fortunate that Twitter didn’t shut down Fabric since a lot of developers depend on its tools for app development. Having only the owners shift is good, without any improvising required for platform itself.
Fabric by itself was founded in 2011 and up until now, it’s garnered a large following both by independent developers and company stalwarts alike.