Fabric is Twitter's set of tools that helps mobile app developers to build, distribute and monetize apps. These tools are designed to give developers easy access to Gnip, Fabric's data platform, and the MoPub ad revenue platform. This gives a wide range of analytics and tools for development and a complete set of enterprise APIs driven by real-time and historical social data and hosted methods to make money using it. A stream of data that's the size generated by Twitter is extremely difficult to manage. Tools that do the filtering for you and building a monetization platform around the data makes development much easier.
Twitter says this deal will allow them to focus on "core products and business to best position Twitter for long-term growth" and that they are confident that Fabric will be a great addition to Google's efforts to provide tools and a platform for mobile developers. Existing services that were available through Fabric — Gnip, MoPub (a set of monetization tools) and Twitter's Ad API will still exist and be available.
For Google, the acquisition means a little more.
Expect Google to build upon what Fabric has to offer with Firebase as a preferred data and analytics platform.
While Gnip isn't part of the deal, it is a competitor to Firebase — Google's own data platform. Expect Google to build upon what Fabric has to offer with Firebase as a preferred data and analytics platform. They also will acquire the Twitter employees working on Fabric, and they're always on the lookout for talent when it comes to mobile app development and building the tools to make it easier. Perhaps the most important part of the purchase is Crashalytics — Twitter's easy to use and very popular tool for detecting and analyzing application crashes and failures. Crashalytics will help Google manage application behavior metrics across their entire ecosystem.
It's unclear what this means for developers who are invested in the Fabric platform. There will certainly be changes once things are merged into Google's operations, and those may affect how the services work as well as access to them. This play is not about Twitter from Google's perspective, so developers will likely have to transition their products to use these changes or find an alternative.
