Disabling crash reporting with manifest meta key firebase_crashlytics_collection_enabled

[twinkle...@gmail.com]

I'm doing the migration from FirebaseCrash to Crashlytics. Using this page https://firebase.google.com/docs/crashlytics/upgrade-from-crash-reporting as a guide. I would like to disable crash reporting in debug mode, so I was hoping that adding this line to my *debug* AndroidManifest.xml would disable crash reporting in debug builds.

   

<meta-data android:name="firebase_crashlytics_collection_enabled" android:value="false" />

I found that when I ran the app after the migration, I got a crash at the first call to Crashlytics.log, saying that Fabric wasn't initialized, so in my application subclass I had to add:

Fabric.with(this, Crashlytics())

So, after adding that, and also setting up some activity to crash in onCreate, I get a message saying crash report was sent (in debug build). Is my call to 'Fabric.with' overriding the setting of firebase_crashlytics_collection_enabled? Or is that meta key not available in the version I used? In build.gradle I have "implementation 'com.crashlytics.sdk.android:crashlytics:2.9.3'" and my Firebase deps are 12.0.1.