Huh? If Twitter's future is not ads and analytics then what is it?
How does selling Fabric make them less focused on ads? Looking at the numbers, ads is their main source of revenue.
Welcoming Fabric to Google
91–100 of 133 posts
Re: Welcoming Fabric to Google
#92Knowing 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.
Disclosure: Microsoft HockeyApp PM (http://hockeyapp.net)
HockeyApp has a very similar feature-set to Fabric. It supports crash analytics, beta distribution, user feedback, and user telemetry. We also host a open source benchmark between many of the crash analytics services, http://crashprobe.com, in case you are looking for a list of others in this space.
You also might be interested to check out the preview of next gen mobile development product Mobile Center, https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2016/11/16/vis....
Re: Welcoming Fabric to Google
#93Unlikely 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?
https://www.hockeyapp.net (they were bought by Microsoft)
Re: Welcoming Fabric to Google
#94Fabric 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…
Definitely a missed opportunity for Apple. Crashlytics would have been a huge asset for their own analytics.
Re: Welcoming Fabric to Google
#95I'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.
In 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.
Re: Welcoming Fabric to Google
#96I 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.
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Re: Welcoming Fabric to Google
#97Based 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 t…
The approach Firebase takes can be summarized as, "make the 90% use cases simple, and make the complicated 10% possible." Tradeoffs are a core engineering concept, so I think this comes as no surprise to seasoned engineers (the more cynical ones often phrase the question as "what's the catch"). By partnering with Google Cloud Platform, we're working to make the complicated 10% much easier (tradeoff here is lower cost…
> As for the financial costs--you're paying someone else to build and manage your infrastructure, so yes, it will cost more than buying raw infra. Again, this is a tradeoff: is this more valuable to your product/users to answer pages or build features? Depending on where you are in your product lifecycle, YMMV
First, 2-3 orders of magnitude more expensive is quite a steep price to pay for the featureset of Firebase.
Second, it’s only a good idea to use Firebase if you don’t plan on ever migrating away – because that will be hell.
And third, Firebase is a massive engineering effort, and I’m surprised that stuff actually works, considering how much work it is to try and replicate the features I need myself.
On the other hand, somehow I feel like Firebase is just an example of the hell we live in, one of the greatest development tools, and all of it is secret, most not even patented, never will be open or free, and just being used to force developers into a closed ecosystem of Google’s Cloud.
It’d be a lot nicer place if projects like this would be open, so people could use it on their own systems (because I certainly won’t trust a company running systems in a country ruled by Trump).
Re: Welcoming Fabric to Google
#98Knowing 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.
You could try AppDynamics mobile RUM product.
https://www.appdynamics.com/product/mobile-real-user-monitor...
Disclosure : I work there
Re: Welcoming Fabric to Google
#99Well, 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.
Re: Welcoming Fabric to Google
#100Unlikely 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?
Apteligent, for one. Long time player with a strong offering for crash reporting and much more. (I'm not associated, just a fan.)
Ahh they used to be called Crittercism. Yeah I used to use them too