This is why I don't use Fabric. It's really unfortunate.

This great piece of technology doesn't belong to them. I would use it if it was owned by some other company that's more fit for the ownership, such as Google, because I know they have a clear business model and know exactly what they will do with the data they gather. But at this point Twitter has 0 trust among developers.

Why would I depend on a piece of technology developed by a company that's struggling to find a way to make money and will probably do whatever is possible to extract value out of its assets? (Which includes spinning it off to oblivion)

Fabric fits in by providing twitter with a boat load of demographic and app usage data. They may still want that data for advertising purposes.

Having said that, I'm personally always wary about using an infrastructure piece for free. If my app relies on something, it's pretty important that it not easily go away. I can't count the HN threads of upset developers, frustrated about something being shuttered that was provided free.

Disclosure: I'm the co-founder of https://raygun.com which does mobile crash reporting, and more.

And think about how much this costs Twitter! The Fabric SDK allows apps to do phone number verification (SMS/Voice calls) for free. This is usually the single greatest cost associated with running any app that does phone number verification (often even above engineering salaries). Multiply the number of SDK users by the cost of SMS/voice delivery, and that's a ton of money out the door every month.

There were some rumors that Twitter has tried to spin off Fabric into another home, but it sounds like potential buyers balked when they saw the costs associated with it.

The prevailing theory is that Twitter originally saw this as a way to collect user data in the mobile app paradigm in the same way that the Twitter "follow" and "tweet" buttons do in the web paradigm. It sounds like it hasn't paid off, though.

You forget that Twitter purchased an SMS aggregator a few years back. SMS sending is near free for Twitter. I still remember integrating all of the VPNs to the carriers to support this mess.

"Near free" is expensive at that scale. Look at Twilio's S1, Twitter's costs can't be much lower than theirs.

Fabric is a good product, but all Apple has to do is wave their hands and it's dead. If/when they launch their own product, third-parties fun will be over.

Fabric's been supporting Android since very early on. I'm sure they don't want to compete with Apple but it certainly wouldn't kill the platform either.

Fabric is an user tracking beacon. You cant sell targeted ads at scale without owning one.