Crashlytics vs Fabric vs Firebase Crash Reporting — I'm lost

OK. So after contacting support I did it!
The problem was that in initial setup (Quality → Crashlytics) when you've being asked “Is this app new to Crashlytics”, you have to choose “My app doesn't have any version of the SDK”.
Even though your app already has latest Crashlytics SDK installed!

Crashlytics Setup

Question probably should be “Do this app already use Fabric? —Yes, —No”.
This seems just like a UX error that should be fixed.

As for the terms and history:

  • In 2011 there was Crashlytics.
  • Also in 2011 there was Firebase.
  • In 2013 Twitter acquired Crashlytics
  • In 2014 Crashlytics/Twitter announced Fabric – a modular SDK which contains Crashlytics
  • In 2014 Google acquired Firebase.
  • In 2016 Google introduced Firebase Crash Reporting.
  • In 2017 Google acquired Fabric with Crashlytics, deprecate previous Firebase Crash Reporting and now calls its crash analytics service “Crashlytics”.
  • In 2020 Fabric is deprecated and “Firebase Crashlytics” is the remaining service. Integrated using pod 'Firebase/Crashlytics'.

Correct me if I'm wrong.


firebaser here

Sorry about any confusion this may be causing.

Crashlytics is a part of Fabric, and is becoming a part of Firebase. Firebase Crash Reporting is the previous crash reporter in Firebase, but has been deprecated and removed.

At this point you should be able to do everything from the Firebase console, following the instructions here: https://firebase.google.com/docs/crashlytics/

At the moment that means you need these two pods:

# Pods for PodTest
pod 'Fabric', '~> 1.7.11'
pod 'Crashlytics', '~> 3.10.7'

The Crashlytics SDK is currently compatible in both Fabric and Firebase, but requires the Fabric SDK as a result. In early 2019, we plan on shipping a new Crashlytics SDK that is optimized for Firebase and will have the Fabric dependency removed. When updating to that version of the SDK, then you'll be able to remove pod 'Fabric' and everything will be simpler.


Crashlytics used to be a product of Fabric. Two years ago Google bought them and started integrating their services in Firebase. Fabric will run as a separate product until mid 2019 as stated in their blog. Therefore you are better off registering with Firebase and following the instructions from their site as otherwise you will soon need to migrate anyway.

Firebase Crash Reporting used to be the the crash reporting solution of Firebase before Fabric was bought. Now it is deprecated in favour of Crashlytics as stated here.