Google Shutting Fabric In Mobile App Development Shake-Up
Google is consolidating its two mobile app development platforms and urging partners and customers to start their migrations from Fabric to Firebase.
Many of the popular Fabric tools, including Crashlytics for crash reporting and analysis, have already been rolled into Firebase, and the rest will be integrated before Fabric is shut down in the middle of next year.
"Over the past few months, we’ve been working hard to bring the best of the Fabric and Firebase platforms together in a thoughtful way with the goal of giving you one central place to build, improve, and grow your apps," wrote Jason St. Pierre and Kristen Johnson, product manager and product lead for app quality, respectively, in a Fabric blog.
St. Pierre and Johnson invited Fabric users to "begin the journey" to an upgraded Firebase.
"This is a merger of two products that really belong together as one," said Simon Margolis, director of cloud platform at Los Angeles-based Google partner SADA Systems.
Firebase was the "all-in" Google mobile development suite, Margolis said. But Fabric had unique features desirable for some projects, such as Crashlytics and Answers.
Both suites had overlapping analytics components as well, Margolis said, "so it makes even more sense to combine these."
Google's channel had been anticipating the merger, Kamal Puri, a partner at MediaAgility, told CRN.
The Princeton, N.J.-based Google partner occasionally used Fabric to build apps, primarily for its crash analytics capabilities, and also leveraged Fabric Beta to distribute beta projects to users.
With Crashlytics already working in Firebase, and Beta on the roadmap, MediaAgility has completed migrating those apps to Firebase in anticipation of Fabric's sunset, Puri said.
"Firebase has really grown in the last couple of years and now the integration with GCP [Google Cloud Platform] makes it even better for mobile app use cases," Puri said.
Crashlytics was the name of the Boston-based startup that created Fabric. The company's initial technology quickly became a popular service for crash analysis—success that helped Fabric adoption scale rapidly within a year of that development platform's launch.
Twitter purchased Crashlytics in 2014, only to sell its development platform and crash analytics tools to Google last year.
Firebase also came under Google's roof through an acquisition that was completed in 2014.
Since then, Google has advanced the platform to form a back-end-as-a-service that promises to alleviate developers’ pains in Android, iOS and mobile web development.
Before taking on Fabric's capabilities, Firebase had more than a dozen different technologies for helping develop apps and monetize them.