It's always a disaster when I have to work with an app that uses Fabric because it requires weird IDE plugins and sign ins and other nutso stuff and the build can fail if you don't have them. If they just made it a Gradle dependency like any other library it would be easy to use. Sometimes I'm lucky enough I'm paid to work on other parts of the app and can just comment out their init stuff so it doesn't crash and put it back in when I'm done.
That said, their IDE plugin bullshit is likely due to trying to automatically capture and upload the mapping of pre-obfuscated code to obfuscated code for when crash reports come in. Still, I would prefer just a app compile time dependency and then a gradle build tool dependency if they really have to do that, no breaking the build just because a certain plugin/desktop app isn't running.
That said, their IDE plugin bullshit is likely due to trying to automatically capture and upload the mapping of pre-obfuscated code to obfuscated code for when crash reports come in. Still, I would prefer just a app compile time dependency and then a gradle build tool dependency if they really have to do that, no breaking the build just because a certain plugin/desktop app isn't running.