It is not just an “acqui-hire.” In a blog post today, Crashlytics mentions that it is merging with Twitter, bringing its analytics tools inside the social-networking giant, and the company’s product will continue to be available, and that it will continue developing it from within Twitter:
Crashlytics announced that it has merged with Twitter… (Credit: Crashlytics)
In a blog post today, Crashlytics co-founders Jeff Seibert and Wayne Chang announced that the company is “joining the flock,” the term often used when people or companies are hired or acquired by Twitter:
“With today’s announcement, much will remain the same. Development of Crashlytics will continue unabated and we remain dedicated to working with all of our customers – current and new, big and small – to deliver the key app performance insights they need.”
The blog post further stated: “Going forward, we are thrilled to work with the incredible team at Twitter. We share a passion for innovating on mobile and building world-class applications. Joining forces will accelerate our build-out, allowing us to leverage Twitter’s infrastructure to deliver new features faster than ever.”
Crashlytics, the Boston-based crash reporting firm makes a tool that allows developers to get comprehensive reports on issues with apps and what exactly was causing them. Their dashboards on the web and in the Mac app allows for extensive analysis and reporting of crashes so that developers can tackle the problems more efficiently.
The service, which debuted in late 2011, has quickly become known as a useful tool for app developers looking for a streamlined method to address a huge hole in mobile app development. With hundreds of millions of devices in use around the world, it was impossible for developers to fully test every edge-case and catch every bug before release. Even worse, when problems did crop up, it was often difficult and complicated to find the root cause. App developers were stuck with little insight into what happened and forced to rely on vague end-user feedback to diagnose problems.
According to the company blog post expounding on the development: “We built Crashlytics to deliver the world’s most powerful and lightest-weight crash reporting solution. With us, developers gain instant visibility into the precise line of code that caused a crash, enabling them to more easily fix issues. Since our iOS launch, we have had the privilege of working with thousands of incredible app developers, from those building independent passion-projects to many of the top iOS apps available today.”
Terms of the acquisition were not revealed, but it could represent a major payday for co-founders Jeff Seibert and Wayne Chang. However, it is not yet clear if Twitter is interested in the Crashlytics product line, or just its engineering talent in an acquihire.
Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, although the company did tweet news of the acquisition.