Why Google Has Acquired Most of Twitter's Developer Platforms

Google was touted as the obvious acquirer of Twitter last year when the latter was reported to be trying to sell.

But now Google gets something even better: cherry picking the services and people it really wants without the additional baggage, both financially, operationally - and reputationally. JL

Kurt Wagner and Tess Townsend report in Re/code:

Google is taking on Fabric and plans to integrate it with its own developer team. A backend-as-a-service startup, was acquired by Google in 2014. The developer platform has reportedly quadrupled its number of users to 450,000 by mid-2016 and adding analytics capabilities and mobile development tools.

Google and Twitter have agreed to an acquisition deal — just not the one many expected three months ago.

Google is acquiring Twitter’s suite of developer products, including its developer suite Fabric which includes the crash reporting service Crashlytics. Twitter acquired Crashlytics back in 2013.

The two companies are not sharing deal terms, but every member of Twitter’s Fabric team has been offered a job at Google. One source estimated the team at around 60 employees.

Fabric is the collection of products that Twitter rolled out 18 months ago to try and encourage mobile app developers to integrate more closely with Twitter’s core app.

But when the company announced another round of layoffs back in October, it also added that it would be refocusing the company around what employees call “Bluebird,” the main Twitter app. This was less than a month after Twitter decided to forgo its annual developer conference, Flight, a flag that Twitter was trying to figure out what to do with Fabric amid all the changes.

In the fall, Twitter started exploring options to offload its fringe businesses, like Fabric and Vine, the latter of which has since been shut down. At least one other company, Microsoft, showed some interest in acquiring Fabric, according to multiple sources.

But now Google is taking on Fabric and plans to integrate it with its own developer team, Firebase, according to a blog post.

Firebase, a backend-as-a-service startup, was acquired by Google in 2014. The developer platform has since expanded, reportedly roughly quadrupling its number of users to 450,000 by mid-2016 and adding analytics capabilities and mobile development tools.

As part of the acquisition, Crashlytics co-founders Jeff Seibert and Wayne Chang are leaving Twitter, but not headed to Google. (Seibert was head of Twitter’s core product team for a brief time in early 2016.)

Rich Paret, who joined Twitter as part of the initial Crashlytics acquisition, has been an engineering exec on the developer product front and will lead the team that heads to Google.