Twitter Fabric

» see fabric.io as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

I was inside this product's numbers for years without ever opening it. Fabric was not something you signed up for, it was something a developer bolted into an application you already had, and the figure Google quoted when it bought the company was 2.5 billion active devices. Any Android phone in this country with a normal set of apps on it was almost certainly counted in that, mine included, reporting home every time something fell over.

Twitter announced Fabric in October 2014 at Flight, its first developer conference, in San Francisco. The pitch was a set of kits you added to an app one at a time. Crashlytics handled stability, with Beta for handing out test builds and Answers for usage numbers. MoPub sold ads, and Twitter Kit covered everything that touched Twitter itself, including Digits, a sign-in system that used a phone number and a text message in place of a password.

The reason any of it worked was Crashlytics, which Twitter had not built. Wayne Chang and Jeff Seibert founded it in 2011 and Twitter bought it in January 2013, by which point it was already the tool mobile developers reached for first. Fabric was an attempt to wrap a company Twitter had acquired inside a platform Twitter wanted to own.

~ the case file ~

~ what a crash report is worth ~

Before Crashlytics, finding out why your app had died on somebody else's phone was miserable work. The operating system produced a stack trace full of hexadecimal addresses, you needed that exact build's symbol file to turn the addresses into function names and line numbers, and the report only reached you if the user filed it or the store handed it over days later.

Crashlytics did the symbol work on its own servers, grouped identical crashes so a thousand reports collapsed into one line with a count beside it, and did all of it in near real time for free. The free part is what put it into a million apps. It meant two people shipping their first release got the same crash tooling a hundred-person company had, which had not been true before and stopped being remarkable afterward.

~ what google bought ~

Google announced the acquisition on 18 January 2017 and did not pretend the prize was Fabric. The team went into Firebase and Crashlytics replaced Firebase's own crash reporting, which had been the weaker product. Twitter got out of a business it had never worked out how to charge for, during the same stretch in which it was selling off most of what it had bought.

The number in that announcement is the one to keep. Fabric had 580,000 developers and reached 2.5 billion active devices. Twitter's own user count at the time was around 320 million. The developer tooling it was handing away touched roughly eight times as many phones as the social network it was keeping, and nobody at the time treated that as strange.

~ the last day it reported ~

Google said Fabric was going away on 13 September 2018 and then took two years over it, which by the standards of this file is unusually careful. The fabric.io dashboard shut down on 31 March 2020. The old SDK carried on sending crashes for another seven months and stopped on 15 November 2020, along with the gradle plugin and the Maven repository the whole thing was distributed through.

Apps still shipping the old library did not break on 15 November. They went quiet, and their owners found out later, when a release went bad and nothing arrived at the other end. Taking down the Maven repository was the louder half: builds that had not been touched in a year stopped resolving, which for a lot of small teams was the first news that any of this had happened at all.

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