Twitter’s financial woes have been plaguing the company for years now and now the micro-blogging platform is cutting its losses. On the flip side of announcing that it suffered losses in the region of $100 million in 2016, Twitter has gone on to shut down Vine, though it did introduce automatically replaying videos that are less than 6 seconds long. Now, the latest asset to bite the dust is Fabric, the app development platform.
Thankfully, Fabric doesn’t have a foot in its grave as it has been confirmed that the service has been acquired by Google for an undisclosed amount. By no longer maintaining the app development platform, Twitter is slimming its overhead somewhat, giving it time to figure out how to be self-sustaining. Unfortunately for Twitter, divesting itself of Fabric also gives up a key advantage it had over Facebook, who had also shuttered down their app development platform Parse.
Fabric’s team will join Google’s Developer Products Group and work alongside Google’s Firebase team.
“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. 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.”
– Fabric Team
However, while the majority of Fabric’s services including Crashlytics & Answers app analytics will now be managed by Google, Digits, the SMS authentication service, will be managed by Twitter.
“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.”
– Francis Ma, Firebase Product Manager
Source: Fabric Blog, Google Blog.
