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Google acquires Twitter's dev platform

Lauren Kate Rawlins
By Lauren Kate Rawlins, ITWeb digital and innovation contributor.
Johannesburg, 19 Jan 2017
Twitter's mobile development platform will be acquired by Alphabet's Google.
Twitter's mobile development platform will be acquired by Alphabet's Google.

Alphabet's Google has signed an agreement to acquire Twitter's mobile development platform, Fabric, for an undisclosed sum.

Fabric was launched in 2014 with the goal of helping developers build better apps, understand their users, and grow their business.

In the last two years, Fabric has grown to reach 2.5 billion active mobile devices, and its software development kits, Crashlytics and Answers, were recently recognised as the top kits for app stability and analytics.

The Fabric team will join Google's developer products group, and work with the Firebase team.

"We're excited to combine these platforms together to make the best mobile developer platform in the world for app teams," said the Fabric team in a blog post.

"Fabric customers: there's no action you need to take in order to keep using these products. You can preview the new terms of use that will apply when the transaction is closed."

Francis Ma, Firebase product manager, says: "We expect that Crashlytics will become the main crash reporting offering for Firebase and will augment the work that we have already done in this area.

"We'll share further details in the coming weeks after we close the deal, as we work closely together with the Fabric team to determine the most efficient ways to further combine our strengths. During the transition period, Digits, the SMS authentication service, will be maintained by Twitter."

Slimming down

The Fabric acquisition is the latest in a string of deals and closures by micro-blogging site Twitter. The company is struggling with stagnant user growth, heavy losses and mounting competition from other social media giants.

In October last year, it cut 9% of its global workforce to keep costs down and announced it would discontinue Vine, a video app launched in 2013 that played brief clips on a repeat loop.

Twitter launched a live-streaming app in 2015, called Periscope, with hopes it would revive the company. However, it has seen stiff competition from Facebook and Instagram, which baked the feature directly into their main apps - which means users do not have to download a separate app and build a new audience.

Google, Disney and Salesforce have all reportedly been interested in making a bid for the company, but nothing has come to fruition.

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