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Welcoming Fabric to Google

firebase.googleblog.com

81–90 of 133 posts

Re: Welcoming Fabric to Google

#82
Glad 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).

Re: Welcoming Fabric to Google

#83

Knowing 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.

Check out Apteligent, better crash reporting as well as performance data, user behavior and business impact. As a bonus your data doesnt go into Twitter or Google's ad networks and it's COPPA compliant.

I heard great things about Apteligent, especially from larger apps and teams. Was Twitter using the data from Crashlytics for ads? I am not sure if there's a clear answer, but they are an ad company at the end of the day.

Re: Welcoming Fabric to Google

#84
post #40

Unlikely 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?

You can look at the most popular crash reporting sdks here: https://mightysignal.com/top-ios-sdks?tag=6

Re: Welcoming Fabric to Google

#85

Knowing 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.

I'm not really aware of what dev tools Google killed besides code/code search, but I would hope that as they get more serious about Google Cloud they will get better about not pissing off developers unnecessarily.

Re: Welcoming Fabric to Google

#86
post #31

Twitter just lost one of their crown jewels; Fabric is probably the biggest mobile analytics platform out there.

It 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…

As 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.

Re: Welcoming Fabric to Google

#87
post #16

So weird to see the mostly dead 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.

Actually, 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.

its 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.

Re: Welcoming Fabric to Google

#89

I 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.

twitter.com is also blocked, so no difference.

Re: Welcoming Fabric to Google

#90
post #20

Fabric 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 th…

Really? 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.

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