It's Time to Upgrade to the New Firebase Crashlytics SDK!

We graduated the Firebase Crashlytics SDK to General Availability (GA) back in June, and today we are encouraging you to migrate your apps from the Fabric SDK to the Firebase Crashlytics SDK. On November 15th, we’ll be sunsetting the legacy Fabric SDK, meaning any apps that are still using the Fabric SDK will no longer report crashes.

Android

The Firebase Crashlytics SDK can now upload crashes after an app has closed, allowing you to receive crash data in more real time on Android! We’ve been tracking how the Firebase Crashlytics SDK performs, and we estimate the new SDK captures ~30% more Android crashes, and twice as many on the actual day of the crash.

Additionally, we streamlined our Crashlytics Gradle Plugin, with a new API in the build.gradle for managing and uploading mapping files and native symbol files. The total size of the plugin has also been reduced from 20+ MB to only 100 KB. In order to reduce build times the new plugin supports task configuration avoidance, and has improved up to date checking for gradle tasks. The new plugin will also support all modern Android Gradle Plugin features, such as cleaner support for disabling mapping file uploads of different flavors or buildtypes, and troubleshooting for 4.1+ versions of Android Studio.

iOS

We introduced platform support for Catalyst, App Clips for iOS 14, and community support for watchOS!

We also improved our upload-symbols conversion speed. Customers with large dSYMs should see a significant decrease in the time it takes to upload Crashlytics symbols, going from an average of 12 minutes for a 600 MB dSYM down to ~45 seconds!

We also enabled tvOS and macOS apps to share the same Crashlytics installation as an iOS app. You can now configure apps with the same bundle ID to be part of the same project. Meaning crash reports from every OS will be shown in the same dashboard.

Overall improvements

In addition to technical improvements, our new SDK has APIs (e.g., package names, initialization code) designed to be consistent with other Firebase products, while also getting rid of references to the now deprecated fabric.io namespace. For example, we changed the Crashlytics initialization statement to use new methods that are more consistent with how other Firebase services are initialized:

Fabric.with([Crashlytics.self])

is no longer needed. It is now sufficient to simply call:

FirebaseApp.configure()

It’s time for an upgrade!

To continue getting crash reports, please follow our upgrade guide here. As we mentioned during our SDK GA announcement, November 15th will be the last day to upgrade before the legacy SDK is shutdown.

Lastly, we would like to personally thank all of our users who have been part of this journey from Fabric to Firebase with us. We hope to keep providing an amazing crash reporting experience for you. As always, please let us know your thoughts, and tell us how we can improve Crashlytics.

Happy coding!