Announcing major updates to our roadmap and migration timeline

By Alex Singer, Product Manager & Kristen Johnson, Product Lead for App Quality

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Two years ago, at Google I/O 2017, we stepped on stage for the first time with our new Firebase teammates and shared our lofty vision of bringing the best of our platforms together. Although we had just begun this journey, we committed to giving you, our customers, access to better tools, improved infrastructure, and regular updates on our progress. Since then, we’ve made great headway on ensuring the tools, qualities, and magic you love about Fabric are brought to Firebase. Here are some of the milestones we’ve already hit:

This year at Google I/O 2019, our focus is on giving you a major update and outlining the rest of our journey with greater clarity.

A more precise timeline

After months of careful planning, tons of thoughtful iteration, and lots of customer feedback, we’re announcing that we’ll complete Fabric’s transition to Firebase on March 31st, 2020. What does this mean? It means that you should fully migrate to Firebase before this date, because on April 1st, 2020, you will no longer be able to access your Fabric dashboards.

Updated roadmap

More details on this timeline and FAQs can be found in our product roadmap. We’ve updated the design so it’s easier to see what’s in progress and what has recently shipped! We’ll continue to update it so make sure you check back often.

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App Distribution in alpha

We know many of you have been waiting for more information on the future of Crashlytics Beta, our service that lets you distribute pre-release iOS and Android versions of your app to testers. Our team has been hard at work building the next generation of Crashlytics Beta in Firebase, called App Distribution. Now, we’re excited to give you a preview of this new product in alpha! While Firebase App Distribution isn’t ready for production just yet, you can get early access to try it out and give feedback to our team by signing up for Firebase’s Alpha program. Our plan is to make App Distribution publicly available over the next few months and make sure switching to App Distribution from Crashlytics Beta is as easy as possible.

More recent launches

In addition to launching App Distribution in alpha, we’ve also shipped these new features in Firebase Crashlytics to bring it to parity with Fabric:

  • Unity support. Firebase Crashlytics now supports Unity so developers can use Crashlytics to improve the quality of their games.

  • NDK support. Firebase Crashlytics now supports Native crash reporting on Android so that you can monitor the stability of your native code.

  • New Firebase Crashlytics integrations with Jira, Slack, and PagerDuty. These integrations allow you to track and route stability issues to your team with the tools they already use.

Plus, we’ve added these brand new features to Firebase Crashlytics that were not previously available in Fabric:

  • Crashlytics data export to BigQuery. With Firebase Crashlytics, you can now export your raw crash data to BigQuery and have the freedom to deeply analyze it.

  • Crashlytics Data Studio template. Using Data Studio (a free tool that sits on top of BigQuery), you can make custom dashboards from your Crashlytics data that fit the unique way your team works. We released a Data Studio template that gives you a sense of what’s possible with Crashlytics and BigQuery.

  • Configurable velocity alerts. In Firebase Crashlytics, you can set up alerts that inform you when an issue increases in impact, and configure them to your app’s needs and workflows.

  • Analytics breadcrumbs. These are analytics events that help you retrace user actions preceding a crash so you can troubleshoot issues faster.

What’s next

While we’ve made good progress on bringing the best of Fabric into Firebase, we’re still working on a few things like:

  • Adding search by issue title and subtitle in Firebase Crashlytics

  • Adding crash-free sessions in Firebase Crashlytics

  • Making App Distribution publicly available

What you should do now

If you haven’t already, it’s time to begin the move to Firebase so you can take advantage of the new features we’ve added there, capitalizing on Firebase’s strengths. We’ve made this process easy, but don’t just take our word for it. Here’s what Kayak had to say about the migration:

“Migrating from Fabric to Firebase has been painless and we love how Crashlytics looks and feels in Firebase. We particularly appreciate being able to export our crash data to BigQuery, for deeper analysis, as well as how easy it is to use other parts of the Firebase platform, like Performance Monitoring or Test Lab.”

If you’re using Crashlytics or Answers, Firebase is ready for you and we recommend you fully migrate as soon as possible. You can start the migration by linking your Fabric app to Firebase and then inviting your team. Our migration flow will walk through everything step by step. Keep using the existing Fabric Crashlytics SDK for now. We will let you know when new Firebase Crashlytics SDKs are ready and need to be upgraded.

If you’re using Crashlytics and Beta, we recommend you start using Crashlytics in Firebase, but continue to use Beta in Fabric. Linking Crashlytics will not prevent you from migrating Beta later on. We also recommend signing up for Firebase’s Alpha program so you can test drive App Distribution - we’d love your feedback! We’ll be sure to tell you when App Distribution is ready for production in the coming months.

Thanks Fabric, onward with Firebase

Thank you for trusting Fabric to build, understand, and grow your app. Without you, Fabric wouldn’t have grown to become one of the most popular app development platforms in the world, active on over 2 billion devices. We’re humbled by your support. While we’ll sunset Fabric on March 31st, 2020, we’re not saying goodbye! Without the complexity of maintaining two consoles, we’ll have more bandwidth to make Firebase even better and continue to develop tools that accelerate your app success over there. See you on the other side!

Sincerely,

The Fabric & Firebase team

The future of Fabric: unveiling our roadmap & migration flow

By Jason St. Pierre, Product Manager & Kristen Johnson, Product Lead for App Quality

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We’re beginning a new chapter with Firebase. Over the past few months, we’ve been working hard to bring the best of the Fabric and Firebase platforms together in a thoughtful way with the goal of giving you one central place to build, improve, and grow your apps. While we’ve kept you informed about our progress at events like Google I/O and Firebase Dev Summit, we wanted to take our commitment to transparency further so you can better prepare.

To that end, we have two big exciting announcements:

  1. You can begin migrating to Firebase.
    We’ve integrated the tools and features you love about Fabric (including our best-in-class crash reporter, Crashlytics) right into the Firebase console, and made many improvements to them capitalizing on Firebase’s strengths.

  2. We’re unveiling our migration roadmap.
    This roadmap is designed to give you full visibility into what we’re building, what we plan to launch next, and what actions we recommend you take.

We invite you to begin the journey to Firebase, your upgraded home, and check out our plans for the future!

Use the best of Fabric in Firebase

Firebase is Google’s mobile app development platform that helps you across the entire lifecycle of your app, with smart analytics embedded throughout. Now, it also includes your favorite Fabric tools.

For example, Crashlytics is now available in Firebase, where you can take advantage of new integrations that allow you to export your crash data for custom analysis in BigQuery, trigger workflows, and get insights into the events that led up to a crash. We’ve also evolved Digits into Firebase phone authentication so you can continue to authenticate users without issue. We’ve even added realtime metrics to the latest release section in Firebase, meaning you can continue to monitor your latest builds with confidence.

In the coming months, we’ll be bringing the functionality of Crashlytics Beta, the service you’ve used to distribute pre-release iOS and Android apps, to Firebase. We’ll keep you posted on our progress through the migration roadmap!

Access powerful new tools in Firebase

Not only does Firebase include the best of Fabric, it also offers you brand new capabilities that were not previously available on our platform. With Firebase, you can harness the power of machine learning, test your app on a variety of devices hosted on Google’s cloud, and group your users by their predicted behavior!

Firebase, like Fabric, makes app development faster, easier, and painless.

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Begin the migration to your new home

All Fabric customers can now start to migrate their app and teams to Firebase by going to their Fabric dashboard and clicking on the Firebase icon in the left-hand navigation. We recommend you begin this process soon so you can take advantage of all of the great things we are building for you over in Firebase!

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We’ve made the migration process as smooth as possible. It involves three main steps:

  1. Link your apps to Firebase

  2. Check out Crashlytics in Firebase and install the core Firebase SDK

  3. Invite your team to Firebase

Note: If you previously linked Answers to Firebase, you’ve already done part of the work. To fully migrate to Firebase, you’ll still need to complete this linking flow.

Get insight into the future of Fabric

We’ll continue to support Fabric until the end of 2019, to give you plenty of time to migrate your apps and business to Firebase - but please plan your transition accordingly.

To stay up to date on the migration, check out our roadmap periodically, which sheds light on which products we’ve implemented in Firebase and what’s next.

Relive the Firebase party at WWDC18

by Brian Lynn, Firebase Party Host

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WWDC has drawn to a close and we wanted to share the photos of our party on the night of June 4th. It was great to meet and celebrate app development with many of you, including talented developers from Slack, Adidas, Coinbase, DJI and many more. We were blown away by your enthusiasm to come party with us!

Since we can’t travel back in time, here are some highlights so you can relive the night of fun.

The night begins!

We were excited to roll out the red carpet for our guests at the entrance. Our friendly hosts greeted everyone at the door, and we had food+drinks ready for you as soon as you finished checking in.

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Celebration time

To give The GlassHouse a homey feel, we designed the ambience of our event to resemble the look and feel of Firebase. Throughout the space, we added lighting in Firebase’s colors, custom pillows, video backdrop and more.

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A variety of passed hors d'oeuvre (with vegan options) were served throughout the night. We also designed three developer cocktails for the night: the Moscow ML, Old Functioned and Magarealtime. Thank you to all those who submitted creative names for our cocktails and congrats to the winners!

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The glowing selfie-station with nifty LED sunglasses was a favorite at this year's party. We’re glad that many of you loved the setup, took pictures, and shared them on social media!

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We also had fun playing our AppShip arcade game with many of you. Some of our hosts lost their voice cheering everyone on for that one, final goal of the night. And if you scored an own-goal, you weren't the only one: over half of the balls that went into the goal were last touched by someone from their own team.

Wrapping up the night

A party wouldn’t be complete without some great music and dancing. This year, we had a bigger dance floor with a giant disco ball as well as a talented DJ as usual. Those who didn’t feel like dancing and just wanted to relax, could do so at the outdoor terrace where you could get some fresh air and continue mingling.

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No party can last forever, and goodbyes are always hard. This year, Firebase branded travel mugs and bottle openers were waiting to go home with guests right at the door.

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Thank you to all those who joined us to celebrate app development - we were glad to share all the laughter with you. Check out our full photo album.

Here’s to next year!

From the Twitterverse:

We’re doing it again! Firebase party at WWDC18

by Brian Lynn, Firebase Party Host

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Heading to WWDC this year? Join us at the Firebase party on June 4th as we celebrate with the top iOS developers from around the world.

We’re excited to once again throw a party for our community at this year’s conference. If you’re going to be in town, join us for a night to mingle with other developers, meet engineers and product leads from the Fabric+Firebase team, and relax after the first day of WWDC.

We can’t wait to see you and toast to another exciting summer of mobile development.

  • When: Monday, June 4th, 2018
  • Time: 8:00pm - 12:00am
  • Where: The GlassHouse
  • Price: Free (!)

Tickets are limited so request your invite today! (Note: a confirmed ticket is required for entry)

New resources to help you with GDPR

by Mark Bouchard, Engineering Manager

On May 25th, the most significant piece of European data protection legislation in 20 years comes into effect: the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR.

We know that GDPR compliance is at the top of many of your minds, so we’re pleased to announce updated, GDPR-ready terms that include Data Processing and Security Terms. These Data Processing and Security Terms can help you out even if you aren’t in Europe, because the new regulations can govern the processing of personal data regardless of where it takes place. We believe data protection is important, so we have included it in our Terms of Service acceptance. You can accept these updated terms today by visiting your Fabric dashboard:

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Many organizations also need to specify a Data Processing Officer (DPO) or EU Representative, someone who ensures compliance with the regulations. You can enter your DPO’s details for your organization via your settings dashboard:

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We've also collected the answers to the questions you may need for your own compliance process, including information on the privacy and security certifications we have, the types of end-user information we process, and more. To learn more, see our new support guides for iOS or Android!

Cheers,

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