Crashlytics is joining forces with Twitter
What an incredible journey this past year has been — today, we're excited to announce: we're merging with Twitter to take our platform to an entirely new level! — Our Product — We started Crashlytics a little over a year ago to address a huge hole in mobile app development.
Context & Ripple Effects
Crashlytics, barely a year old and built around crash reporting for mobile app developers, is merging with Twitter — and the pickup was unusually broad, with TechCrunch, Business Insider, GigaOM, CNET, Computerworld, ReadWrite, The Next Web and BostInno all carrying the news on the day. For Twitter this is the second developer-data acquisition of its kind, following its 2011 purchase of BackType, and it lands at a charged moment: the company is deep in IPO preparation with a reported $1 billion revenue target.
The deal also fits the arc John Battelle described just days earlier when he framed Twitter's new Discover functionality as part of a shift toward being a media company — a company assembling data and tooling infrastructure, not just a consumer feed. That it comes the same week as the Vine launch suggests a deliberate January push on multiple fronts.
First-order effects
- Mobile developers who adopted Crashlytics for crash diagnostics now have their app-stability telemetry flowing into Twitter's infrastructure, tying a neutral developer utility to a single platform's stack.
Second-order effects
- Rival crash-reporting and mobile-analytics vendors face a competitor backed by a pre-IPO platform's resources, pressuring them to differentiate on independence or bundle more deeply with iOS and Android ecosystems.
Third-order effects
- If the BackType-then-Crashlytics pattern holds, consumer platforms headed for public listings will keep absorbing developer-infrastructure startups, making independent mobile tooling scarcer and raising the question of which platform's stack a developer is implicitly committing to.
The trend: Pre-IPO consumer platforms are acquiring developer-data and tooling startups to own the mobile development layer beneath their products.