Twitter’s mobile app development platform, also known as “Fabric” has now been sold off to Google for an undisclosed amount of money. The announcement was made today, by the Fabric team on Twitter and also on their website. The acquisition of Fabric also includes their Crashlytics crash reporting system, Answers mobile app analytics, Digits SMS login system and FastLane development automation system. So Google is getting quite a few tools with this purchase. It was back in 2014 when Twitter initially launched Fabric, as a modular SDK. The idea was to allow developers to choose which tools they wanted to use to improve their apps. Fabric’s components currently works with apps that reach about 2.5 billion users, and apps built by 580,000 developers.
The sale of Fabric to Google is a bit of an interesting one, and it begs the question of whether Twitter is trying to off-load some of their teams as they are rumored to be looking for a buyer themselves. And selling Fabric off to Google is a good way to thin out the workforce, as they can send over the platform to Google without shutting down the platform, and making thousands of developers angry in the process. Currently, Google is planning to allow Fabric to continue to do its thing. There are no plans to shut down any of its components at this point. But they will likely be integrated with the other developer tools that Google currently offers, at some point.
Twitter has been looking for a buyer for quite some time. Late last year, it was rumored that the list of buyers included companies like Microsoft, SalesForce, Verizon, Alphabet and even Disney. Of course, none of those rumored buyers did end up picking up the social media platform, but that doesn’t mean that Twitter isn’t still looking for a suitor. By offloading Fabric, they may be able to get a suitor faster, and at a more reasonable price for both parties. It’s tough to say whether the sale of Fabric was to clear some space for them to sell themselves or not, but it sure looks likely.