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Welcoming Fabric to Google
- s_dev 10y agoFabric 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.
- matco11 10y agoWell 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.
- odbol_ 10y agoReally? 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.
- atarian 10y agoDefinitely a missed opportunity for Apple. Crashlytics would have been a huge asset for their own analytics.
- luckydata 10y agoThey are two completely different tools, they can't be compared, serve different purposes.
- fharper1961 10y agoSeems 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 https://fabric.io/blog/fabric-joins-google "Fabric has grown to reach 2.5 billion active mobile devices".
- guelo 10y agoThey have the app data on the Android side which is probably a decent proxy for the iOS app market, but Crashlytics gives them direct visibility into a sizable chunk of the ios market.
- mxstbr 10y agoI hope this isn't Twitter saving the good parts of the company before they crash and burn...
- swanros 10y agoThe trend states so.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rjvir 10y agoWhat 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.
- jayrhynas 10y agoThey do say > During the transition period, Digits, the SMS authentication services, will be maintained by Twitter. but it's unclear what will happen long term
- redindian75 10y agoLong-term it will be with Google. It says so here: As part of this acquisition Digits will be transitioning to Google over the coming months but will be maintained and operated by Twitter in the interim
- alex4Zero 10y agoThe main thing is that Digits is free. We are using it in our products. I hope Google doesn't have plans to earn money here
- jrowley 10y agoI wonder what it costs to operate Twitter Digits. I can't imagine they are using Twilio as an SMS gateway.
- blackaspen 10y agoTwitter has a bunch of longstanding SMS delivery agreements, so it's quite cheap.
- johnsmith21006 10y agoCrazy thought but does Digits have value for Google with adding SMS to Allo?
- jrowley 10y agoSilly me - I was concerned they somehow acquired the Fabic python library. http://www.fabfile.org/ http://www.fabfile.org/
- gdulli 10y agoYeah, that moment of panic when you think something Google acquired is something you use.
- tobltobs 10y agoIn the case of fabric/fabfile this wouldn't matter, as fabric/fabfile looks dead anyway. No Python 3 support, no road map, last Github activity 5 months ago.
- gdulli 10y agoThe latest release was last month. Not that it would be concerning if it really was 5 months ago.
- tobltobs 10y agoIf I still would be using fabric for deployment I would be concerned.
- closed 10y agoThere is a roadmap: http://www.fabfile.org/roadmap.html http://www.fabfile.org/roadmap.html One of the goals in the roadmap is to move part of Fabric's functionality into another library (Invoke), which does have recent activity and supports Python 3.
- neuronexmachina 10y agoUnfortunately, the main dev has been saying that he'll be releasing a rewrite with Python 3 support "at the end of the month" for the past 2-3 years. There's actually a fork ("Fabric3") which fully supports both Python 2.7 and Python 3.4+, but the Fabric dev refuses to merge in any PRs that have been submitted to help with Python 3 support. It's somewhat infuriating. https://github.com/fabric/fabric/pulls?q=is%3Apr+python+3 https://github.com/fabric/fabric/pulls?q=is%3Apr+python+3
- huangc10 10y agoThe 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...
- jayrhynas 10y agoI think they're saying "joining" because > Fabric will join Google's Developer Product Group, working with the Firebase team.
- huangc10 10y agoI think you're right but it's weird how this post is coming from the Firebase blog not a main Google products blog (is there one..?). I guess it makes sense...
- krat0sprakhar 10y agoYes, you're right - it is an acquisition. Jeff Seibert clarifies in his tweet https://twitter.com/jeffseibert/status/821780349164388356 https://twitter.com/jeffseibert/status/821780349164388356
- 10y ago
- sapeien 10y agoI 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.
- srinathrajaram 10y agoThey used to be called crashlytics. Best crash reporting tool . Just works. I guess they probably are a lot more interested in ranking for stuff like crash reporting than people chancing upon their website and trying to figure out who they are.
- huangc10 10y agoagreed
- pkamb 10y agoSo weird to see the mostly dead http://crashlytics.com 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.
- huangc10 10y agoActually, the entire platform is called Fabric while Crashlytics is only a part of the platform (albeit the main part...). They've just kept the website as-is since being acquired by Twitter and integrated into the larger Twitter products portfolio. It is confusing at first though.
- skyebook 10y agoits confusing at second, third, fourth looks too. I use Fabric and Crashlytics pretty heavily and still end up here a few times a month without thinking.
- shortstuffsushi 10y agoI end up going almost exclusively to Crashytics' website, then being redirected at login and have the "oh, right" moment.
- niftich 10y agoHuh, 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11913828#11914620 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11937756#11942293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11937756#11942293 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12784274#12784473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12784274#12784473
- Sujan 10y agoWhat about Fastlane?
- danielhooper 10y agoKnowing 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.
- the_mitsuhiko 10y ago> 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.
- nstj 10y agoBravo on Sentry - it's a terrific platform. I'm especially fond of the breadcrumbs, they're a great feature.
- the_mitsuhiko 10y agoThanks so much. It's always great to hear when people enjoy what we're doing :)
- julien_c 10y agoLove it as well and I am recommending it to everyone I know who's shipping iOS apps
- pvinis 10y agoIndeed. I was about to write and suggest sentry for crash reporting plus extra features. I'm starting to use breadcrumbs now to test and see how they can be useful.
- 10y ago
- atarian 10y agoTwitter just lost one of their crown jewels; Fabric is probably the biggest mobile analytics platform out there.
- krschultz 10y agos/lost/sold/ Twitter clearly decided that dev tools were a non-core part of their business. Meanwhile Google has been investing more heavily in becoming a platform company to compete with AWS, and also increasing their investment in mobile through Firebase.
- on_and_off 10y agoIt is also a bizarre buy. Google has been building a competitor to fabric crash reporting. 6 months ago it was an MVP, but the version unveiled recently is pretty close to fabric. I am not sure what they are buying here, it seems that google could sherlock everything that fabric does, especially since fabric is not that great in my experience. Maybe it just illustrates that I am missing some info on why Google would get in such a buyout
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- crgt 10y agoAs an example - we use Crashalytics at work. Even if Google built a parity product, we wouldn't have switched; Crashalytics was a known entity with few pain points. So if Google wanted our data (and others like us..) the only way to get that data is by acquiring Crashalytics. tldr: they bought it for the install base, not the product.
- KayL 10y agoI used it in my all iOS development. Will it be 2nd class?
- troymc 10y agoI guess they don't mean this Fabric: http://www.fabfile.org/ http://www.fabfile.org/
- relics443 10y agoWhile Firebase is still awesome, there was a definite downgrade in support when Google integrated them. Hopefully this will go better.
- asciimike 10y agoFirebase team member here, Anything specific you'd like to let us know about? Definitely agree that it hasn't been the smoothest transition--it's super hard to provide 24/7 support to hundreds of thousands of developers. Any feedback you can provide will help us refine that process.
- jondubois 10y agoBased 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 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.
- wmblaettler 10y agoI don't know if the Alexa.com ranking of Firebase.com is really indicative of popularity due to the fact they moved their main site to https://firebase.google.com/ https://firebase.google.com/ about the time of the sharp decline indicated.
- bduerst 10y agoThat Alexa rank drop for firebase.com is because they switched from firebase.com to firebase.google.com, not because there is a decrease in interest. The latter is the first result when you search: https://www.google.com/#q=firebase https://www.google.com/#q=firebase Also, searches for firebase have increased, which indicates more interest: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%2012-m&q=firebase https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%2012-m&q=fi...
- dabeeeenster 10y agoCompletely disagree. We started using Firebase; compared to using websockets with e.g Pusher its much, much simpler, primarily because it's a store of state as well as a real time stream. It also handles going off-line and then syncing whilst coming back online perfectly and without any additional code. Yes of course you need a server for most apps, but I don't see a problem with that. Yes, your app might have data in two places, but it's still the simplest way to build a real-time app. My biz has done it several times and the smallest, simplest code base has been with Firebase. Far fewer moving parts too.
- sebleon 10y agoUnlikely 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?
- gorkemcetin 10y agoUsing Countly for crash reporting (https://count.ly/crash-reports/ https://count.ly/crash-reports/)
- HodGreeley 10y agoApteligent, for one. Long time player with a strong offering for crash reporting and much more. (I'm not associated, just a fan.)
- robbyk 10y agoAhh they used to be called Crittercism. Yeah I used to use them too
- zazpowered 10y agoYou can look at the most popular crash reporting sdks here: https://mightysignal.com/top-ios-sdks?tag=6 https://mightysignal.com/top-ios-sdks?tag=6
- ivm 10y agohttps://www.hockeyapp.net https://www.hockeyapp.net (they were bought by Microsoft)
- zaren678 10y agoAs an alternative for Digits Facebook offers Accountkit (https://developers.facebook.com/products/account-kit https://developers.facebook.com/products/account-kit) which provides phone number and email based login. Full disclosure, I work for Facebook.
- guelo 10y agoHuh? If Twitter's future is not ads and analytics then what is it?
- farquaad 10y agoHow does selling Fabric make them less focused on ads? Looking at the numbers, ads is their main source of revenue.
- zero-x 10y agoBest of luck, really dig the platform.
- closed 10y ago(This Fabric is not the popular python library for deploying things from the command line.)
- gorkemcetin 10y agoI 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.
- azurezyq 10y agotwitter.com is also blocked, so no difference.
- gorkemcetin 10y agoTwitter.com only, or also Crashlytics services too?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- orbitur 10y agoI'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.
- mbleigh 10y agoFirebase engineer here -- what don't you like about the Firebase Console? Any specific things that we could improve?
- tobltobs 10y agoYour texts and instructions are byzantine. For example, what is the following supposed to say: "By default, your Firebase Analytics data will enhance other Firebase features and Google products. You can control how your Firebase Analytics data is shared in your Firebase settings at any time. Link your AdMob app(s) to Firebase and we'll share your data from the free Firebase Analytics tool with AdMob to improve app monetization and user engagement. You understand that this linkage may also allow AdMob Data to be shared with Firebase for enhanced reporting purposes." I guess it means something like "Link you Admob account to Firebase" but it sounds kind of scary.
- pier25 10y agoMy main problems with the console are: 1) Lack of in depth analytics on storage and the database. You give us some vague bandwidth and space metrics which aren't that useful. 2) No way to search, filter, or query the database. The database manager is really only a JSON editor which isn't that useful. I'm guessing this is a consequence of the database API being very limited. 3) Editing rules using a JSON or even Bolt becomes unmaintainable once you reach a certain complexity. Specially if you want to create role based permissions. There should be a UI to manage rules. Even better, there should be a role based permissions system built in.
- HillaryBriss 10y agoIn some ways I agree with you about Google-ifying of the UI design and that confusion. (e.g. there's been a "Google Developers Console" and also a separate "Google Play Developers Console" and I found the relationship between those confusing at times.) OTOH, once I started using Firebase console, I felt that Google was taking a step in the right direction. That is, my general impression has been that Firebase's console is easier for me to make sense of and there is less needless complexity/confusion. One example for me was my general impression with setting up Google Cloud Messaging with the old Google Developer Console (a couple of years ago) and more recently setting up Firebase messaging in the Firebase console. It just seemed easier and smoother to set up Firebase messages. There seemed to be less gotchas and dead ends, for what that's worth.
- sulam 10y agoHow 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.
- tn13 10y agoWhat does this mean for moPub ?
- nstj 10y agoHaving 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/ https://sentry.io/
- zeeg 10y agoAside we're also building a bunch of open source tooling (our entire platform is open source) around mobile, so if you're looking to roll your own or bring something in-house, we'd love to hear your feedback. https://github.com/getsentry https://github.com/getsentry
- pier25 10y agoCan confirm, Sentry is awesome. It's been very easy to integrate in our web apps and the results are helpful.
- xugo 10y agowhat about stripe ?
- chambo622 10y agoWhat about them?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Hydraulix989 10y agoGlad 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).
- mindcrime 10y agoWell, 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.
- KerryJones 10y agoMore 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.
- alex4Zero 10y agoThe only thing I'm worry about is Digits. I hope Google won't close it
- andy 10y agoLet's hope it doesn't end up like Adwhirl. :(
- stevepotter 10y agoI'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.
- chrisstott 10y agoYou might be interested in buddybuild's beta distribution which does automatic UDID management. It basically makes it so neither the developer nor the tester ever have to worry about UDIDs ever again. Instead you can send a build to a new tester & trust they can immediately install it. [Disclaimer, I built that feature at buddybuild]
- nnd 10y agoAny recommendations for cloud-based CI/CD services? I'm currently using Bitrise, then delivering to Fabric via fastlane.
- viktorbenei 10y agoDo you have any issue with Bitrise? Just curious (CTO here) You can use fastlane on Bitrise.io if you want to, and you can use the Bitrise CLI locally (https://www.bitrise.io/cli https://www.bitrise.io/cli), similar to fastlane.