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Fabric was a much better analytics tool than Google Analytics.
It's better because:
Instant crash reporting reduces release time anxiety. iTunes and Google analytics need 24 hour collection period.
Fabric can offer Fastlane and Beta -- Toolkits that help deal with distributing builds to testers and releasing apps. Google has nothing to compete with here.
Whatever way Fabric seem to define active users and sessions they seem to produce more accurate reporting while Google numbers integrated with the exact same app produce higher more ego stroking numbers.
Really? That's interesting because for our purposes, Fabric's graphs and windows into the data were much too general and coarse-grained.
For instance, there is no way to see all the data! They only give you the first page of top results. I asked them for pagination and they said it was "technically difficult." Whereas with Google Analytics, I could dive as deep as I wanted into the data. Even when I wanted to isolate a unique, rare event out of thousands.
Plus I could search GA, and correlate different events and properties. Fabric only gave the very basic essential graphs. Which might be great for monitoring a giant app like Twitter, where individual events are just noise, but when you're just getting started with 100-1000 users, you want to see everything those users are doing, especially the outliers.
Well there is that, and also there is the superior accessibility of crash stats.
The Fabric app makes the crash stats very easily accessible to all the relevant people. You are one tap away from them on your phone.
With GA it takes so much more effort to navigate your way to the crash stats.
As a result you respond to issues much more quickly and decisively with Crashlytics. At least that was our experience.
Definitely a missed opportunity for Apple. Crashlytics would have been a huge asset for their own analytics.
They are two completely different tools, they can't be compared, serve different purposes.
The title is a bit ambiguous. From my understanding, Google (Firebase) acquired Fabric from Twitter (not necessarily "joining").
Fabric is one of the top dev tools I use for iOS. I wonder what kind of change is in store...
Yes, you're right - it is an acquisition. Jeff Seibert clarifies in his tweet https://twitter.com/jeffseibert/status/821780349164388356
I think they're saying "joining" because
> Fabric will join Google's Developer Product Group, working with the Firebase team.
Also a big user of Fabric, really hope this means only good things for Fabric users.
Huh, interesting. I once responded to speculation that Google would buy Twitter by saying [1] they'd be better off neutering Twitter's ad network and data mining ambitions that were largely buoyed by Fabric and Crashlytics, and now I figure this will largely accomplish that. It also disproves my point that Twitter can sustainedly pivot into this space [2] by leaning on Fabric, Digits, and Magic Pony, and answers my more recent musing about how Fabric will fare with Twitter's recent downsizing [3].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11913828#11914620 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11937756#11942293 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12784274#12784473
Knowing Google's reputation with abandoning developer tools and services, can anyone offer suggestions as to possible alternatives? Or counterpoints as to why I shouldn't fear this service degrading over the next year or two? We're currently using Fabric and Crashlytics for our iOS app where I work and this news has prompted us to research alternatives.
> We're currently using Fabric and Crashlytics for our iOS app where I work and this news has prompted us to research alternatives.
I spent the last few months working on getting iOS Support going in Sentry (sentry.io). Would love to hear feedback. Not only do we provide a hosted solution but it's also 100% Open Source which should give you the confidence that it will continue working for you no matter what happens.
From the article
> [...] we expect that Crashlytics will become the main crash reporting offering for Firebase [...]
They will be integrating Crashlytics into their core developer offering, Firebase. Looks like if you are just using Fabric's Crashlytics service you will be ok. But there is more room to worry if you are using some of Fabric's other tools.
Having a popular developer tool that is already integrated with a lot of apps in both iOS and Android is valuable strategic asset for Google. Analytics and ads go hand in hand and as tracking cross-app behavior is hard, and having a library that is installed in many apps makes it easier.
I'm pretty sure that this was the strategic thinking when started to invest to app developer tools (Crashlytics, Fabric, Digits, MoPub). It's interesting to speculate why they are selling Fabric, is their business model focus moving away from mobile ads?
Can you please some give examples to developer tools and services Google abandoned that frustrated people? I can't seem to recall any but Google Code Project Hosting and Code Search.
I'm not really aware of what dev tools Google killed besides code/code search, but I would hope that as they get more serious about Google Cloud they will get better about not pissing off developers unnecessarily.
I would say don't fear for now. Google is pouring a lot of money there and want to win developers hearts. They have GA on web, to some extend, now want to grab your mobile and web data. I see it highly unlikely that Firebase will decelerate.
As an alternative, suggesting Countly (open source) - http://github.com/countly/countly-server - with crash reporting, push notifications and analytics.
Check out Apteligent, better crash reporting as well as performance data, user behavior and business impact. As a bonus your data doesnt go into Twitter or Google's ad networks and it's COPPA compliant.
Disclosure: I'm the CEO of Raygun (https://raygun.com).
Raygun provides Crash Reporting & Real User Monitoring. Across both mobile, backend and desktop (and all mobile, including Xamarin stacks). Love to have you check it out.
We've been picking up a bunch of customers who have been getting nervous with Twitter being in a bad shape and worrying about Fabric previously.
Seems to me like the main value for Google is the data from all the apps that have Fabric SDK integration (e.g. Crashlytics).
Quote from the Fabric blog post https://fabric.io/blog/fabric-joins-google
"Fabric has grown to reach 2.5 billion active mobile devices".
Having experienced some rather concerning keychain issues with Digits a few months back and seeing the writing on the wall with Twitter and their stockholders calling for blood I dropped all of my Fabric dependencies in November.
For crash reporting the best alternative I found (superior to Crashlytics IMO) is Sentry[0]. It's been awesome so far and allows you to easily federate crash reporting over multiple platforms. I have no association with the company.
[0]: https://sentry.io/
Twitter just lost one of their crown jewels; Fabric is probably the biggest mobile analytics platform out there.
What does this mean for Twitter Digits? Will their free SMS authentications continue?
It would be a perfect fit if they phased in Twitter Digits as a Firebase authentication provider - I suspect many developers (including myself) already use these 2 services in tandem.
Silly me - I was concerned they somehow acquired the Fabic python library.
I hope this isn't Twitter saving the good parts of the company before they crash and burn...
(This Fabric is not the popular python library for deploying things from the command line.)
So weird to see the mostly dead http://crashlytics.com and its iOS 6-era design (linen texture!) as it's been superseded by "Fabric" and now "Firebase". Seems like such a strong brand name to kill in favor of these very generic alternatives.
I wonder whether China will start banning Fabric servers, as they'll literally be owned by Google. If that would be the case, I cant imagine the mess Chinese developers will face. Assuming they have access to Fabric services now.
How things change, three years ago Fabric was a key part of Twitter's platform strategy. This has to feel like a big letdown, unless you're Jeff Seibert.
Well, this is probably good for Google and Fabric, but I'm less sure about it being good for Twitter. My opinion has long been that Twitter needed to double-down on being developer friendly and developer focused. This seems like the exact opposite of that.
It strikes me as being about as smart as Sears selling off the Craftsman brand. At least, to me, this feels self-defeating.
I'm happy that Crashlytics will live on, as that was something I was concerned about in light of Twitter's recent poor performance.
However, I'm really not looking forward to the eventual Firebase-ifying/Google-ifying of the UI/design. The Firebase/Google Console interfaces are terrible. Just awful. I cringe thinking about what could happen to the Crashlytics UI.
I haven't heard of Fabric before. Fabric seems to have an ambiguous name and their marketing website is equally ambiguous. Something to do with mobile app analytics? I find this trend in developer tool marketing to be appalling.
What about Fastlane?
Glad to see this under a better umbrella. The Twitter developers kept blowing off everyones' requests for Crashlytics to support the gradle-experimental plugin (which was necessary to use the NDK within Android Studio for the longest time).
Unlikely that we'll see improvements in Fabric services for a while... presumably, engineering resources will be focused on integrating with Firebase :(
Anyone recommend alternatives for Crashlytics and Digits?
Huh? If Twitter's future is not ads and analytics then what is it?
Any recommendations for cloud-based CI/CD services? I'm currently using Bitrise, then delivering to Fabric via fastlane.
I'm an active user of Fabric and have found it rather convoluted and limited. For example, there is no way to easily get device UUIDs from Beta testers. Given they also sponsor Fastlane, I'm blown away they haven't provided a way to automatically register UUIDs. This is possible with HockeyApp through their API and some Fastlane scripts.
Crashlytics is their killer feature. The rest is mediocre. Hopefully Google will improve it. I'm not holding my breath.
More of a comment on Firebase -- as someone who was using them pre and post merge -- a whole bunch of small things are notably worse.
They said "great adoption" but it was actually forced (my previous company held on as long to the old Firebase as we could), from things to poor naming specs on export, base URL structures changing, the live-view able to handle less data points and a number of other small things, it was a bit of a let down.
Hoping this goes better.
Best of luck, really dig the platform.
The only thing I'm worry about is Digits. I hope Google won't close it
I guess they don't mean this Fabric: http://www.fabfile.org/
While Firebase is still awesome, there was a definite downgrade in support when Google integrated them. Hopefully this will go better.
Let's hope it doesn't end up like Adwhirl. :(
I used it in my all iOS development. Will it be 2nd class?
What does this mean for moPub ?
what about stripe ?
Based on my experience with Firebase, it doesn't reduce complexity; it just shifts it around and adds extra costs (both financial and performance costs) to your system.
For any serious app, you still need to have a backend server on the side and your Firebase service often becomes bloated and inefficient. Sometimes you want to store the Firebase data inside your main DB as well and so you end up with two sources of truth and Firebase ends up becoming a third wheel to your project (just a bloated data transport layer).
It's not surprising that Firebase has been sliding in terms of popularity: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/firebase.com
It's good for rapid prototyping/MVC but not for any serious use case.
I think the big lesson in the framework/devtools space is that the more opinionated the tooling is, the less flexible it becomes and the fewer use cases it covers.