Google acquisition could make it easier for developers to create apps

By Christian de Looper January 18, 2017

It looks like Google acquired parts of Twitter after all — but not in the way you might expect. That’s because Google is buying out Twitter’s developer products, including Fabric, which operates crash-reporting service Crashlytics — a service that was first acquired by Twitter in 2013.

It’s not yet known exactly what the terms of the deal are, but according to a blog post from Fabric, everyone from Fabric has been offered a job at Google, and ReCode’s sources estimate the number of jobs being offered at around 60.

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Fabric itself was rolled out 18 months ago in an effort to convince developers to more closely integrate their apps and services with Twitter. That attempt, however, wasn’t all that successful, and it was announced in October that Twitter would be refocusing those attempts on “Bluebird,” which is what the Twitter team has code-named the main Twitter app. At the time, Twitter was also announcing layoffs, which brought into question its other services.

As part of that refocus, Twitter has been offloading some of its noncore services — the most high-profile of which is the recently shut down Vine. Fabric, however, is another noncore service the company was trying to get rid of, which is where Google steps in. According to the report, Microsoft was also interested in buying out Fabric.

Owning Fabric is somewhat of a big deal for Google, which will now own two of the most popular mobile app development tools out there — Firebase and Fabric. Thanks to the acquisition, Google could be on track to make it a lot easier for developers to make apps for iOS, Android, and the web.

So what does Google plan on doing with Fabric? Well, it seems as though Google wants to integrate it with Firebase, its own developer team, but Fabric will still operate its own team, which will be led by Rich Paret. As part of the acquisition, a few notable names will be leaving Twitter HQ, including Crashlytics founders Jeff Seibert and Wayne Chang, neither of whom will be joining the Google team.

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