Fabric was a mobile app development software launched by Twitter in 2014. It consisted of various tools for developers – analytics, identity and authentication solutions, and app distribution, to name a few.
The software quickly became popular with developers, reaching 2.5 billion active mobile devices and 580,000 developers by 2016.
What Twitter released as Fabric in 2014 consisted of a core feature – Crashlytics, created in 2011 and purchased by Twitter and several extra tools Twitter added later. This core technology was why Google acquired the software in 2017.
Crashlytics was a top-notch crash reporting tool, and from the moment Google acquired Fabric, they shared their plan to integrate Crashlytics with their other mobile developer kit – Firebase. The latter already had a Crash Reporting service on its own, but Crashlytics was far superior.
Initially, users of both Fabric and Firebase were able to continue using them with little change. However, in September 2018, Google published their roadmap for migration from Fabric to Firebase. The move was carried out in three stages:
First, developers were able to use Crashlitics to keep track of both services.
Second, in early 2019, a new version of the software was released. It had a new support system and allowed Firebase users to carry out simplified beta testing for their projects.
Third and last, in the middle of 2019 the Fabric tool stopped working and developers had to use Firebase.