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