Join us for the monthly mini-profiles on Firebase team members, aka “Firebasers”, from all around the world! Learn about their backgrounds, how they got started with Firebase, what Firebase products they work on, their favorite ways to de-stress, advice, and more.
For our first feature, we’re happy to introduce you to a long standing member of the Firebase community. You may know his work from Firebase Release Notes, one of his talks at Google events, or used one of his many community responses from Stack Overflow. And now, we give you puf!
How did you get started with Firebase?
I was in the habit of answering questions on Stack Overflow to learn about interesting new technologies, when questions about Firebase started showing up. My answers got noticed, and that led to me becoming a member of the Firebase team at Google. And 7 years later, answering questions about Firebase on Stack Overflow is still one of my favorite things to do each day!
Not sure if it counts as a nickname, but I am known as puf. While I respond to both Frank and puf equally, I'm usually the only puf in the room. I got the nickname in my teens, as I was really tired of all the variations of my last name, and I've been known as “puf” to most people since then.
Back in 2019 we launched Firebase Extensions - pre-packaged solutions that save you time by providing extended functionality to your Firebase apps, without the need to research, write, or debug code on your own. Since then, a ton of extensions have been added to the platform covering a wide range of features, from email triggers and text messaging, to image resizing, translation, and much more.
With the Google Pay Firebase Extension, your app can accept payments from Google Pay users, using one or more of the many supported Payment Service Providers (or PSPs), without the need to invoke their individual APIs.
With the extension installed, your app can pass a payment token from the Google Pay API to your Cloud Firestore database. The extension will listen for a request written to the path defined during installation, and then send the request to the PSP's API. It will then write the response back to the same Firestore node, which you can listen and respond to in real time.
Open Source
Like all Firebase Extensions, the Google Pay Firebase Extension is entirely open source, so you can modify the code yourself to change the functionality as you see fit, or even contribute your changes back via pull requests - the sky's the limit.
Summing it up
Whether you're new to Google Pay or Firebase, or an existing user of either, the new Google Pay extension is designed to save you even more time and effort when integrating Google Pay and any number of Payment Service Providers with your application.
As app developers, you want to focus on building functionality that increases the utility of your app for your users. Here at Firebase, our mission is to help app developers succeed, and our services like Firebase Authentication, Firestore, Performance Monitoring, Analytics and others help you focus on what's relevant for developing your app and advancing your business instead of having to build and run infrastructure and services yourself.
With Firebase Extensions, we took this concept to the next level and made it easy for you to quickly add functionality to your app. Instead of having to implement these features yourself, Firebase Extensions allow you to add pre-built and tested functionality with just a few clicks. On top of that, Firebase Extensions are configurable, so you can easily adapt them to your needs.
Solve business problems using Firebase Extensions
But sometimes, you need even more power and flexibility.
For example, you might need an easy-to-use way to set up a marketing campaign that follows all the best practices and industry standards. Sending emails is not enough - you need a solution that supports double opt-in, streamlined and beautiful templates, and a dashboard that provides detailed insights into your campaign.
Or, you might need a customer messaging solution that makes it easy to reach out to your users directly, no matter where they are, to keep them up-to-date on the status of their urgent delivery. And of course you need a solution that grows with your business and works in new markets and countries you're expanding into and supports the local messaging platforms.
Or - you might want to turn your blog about artisanal coffee into a business with a subscription service that allows you to put some of your content behind a paywall.
Implementing all these features and integrations yourself can be a daunting task, and - let's be honest - wouldn't you rather focus on building the core functionality of your app instead of wasting precious time on building solutions for challenges others have already solved? After all, other people have invested a lot of time and thought into building these services, so no need to reinvent the wheel.
With Firebase Extensions, you can leverage existing solutions solve business problems with integrations from industry leaders such as MessageBird, Algolia, Mailchimp, and Stripe.
At Google I/O this year, we announced the following new Firebase Extensions:
The Search with Algolia Extension enables full text search of your Firestore data with Algolia. To learn more about this extension, check out Algolia's blog post here.
The Mailchimp Firebase Sync Extension syncs user data with a Mailchimp audience for sending personalized email marketing campaigns. Learn more about it here.
All of these Extensions are built and maintained by these companies, and are available as open source on GitHub. This means you can read the source code and learn how they were built, adapt them to your specific needs, and even file feature requests for new functionality. Most of our early access users have told us that the configuration options available in the Extensions and the power and flexibility of our partners' services met most of their requirements.
The road ahead
In the spirit of our mission, we want to bring more Firebase Extensions to the platform to enable you to focus on what matters most to you: implementing the best version of your app to solve real business problems and delight your users.
If you have any suggestions for Firebase Extensions, any features you'd like to see us implement, or any partners you'd like us to bring to the platform, please don't hesitate to reach out to us using our feedback form.
We can't wait to see what you build next with the new Firebase Extensions, and look forward to hearing from you!
In November, we added the first new location for the Realtime Database outside the United States, in Belgium. Today, we are adding Singapore as well. We encourage any Firebase developer with a large userbase in Asia to consider using this new location to reduce latency.
All new and existing Firebase developers can create databases in Singapore. Developers on our paid plan can create multiple databases, even mixing databases in multiple locations within a single project.
We’re also announcing that all three locations — the United States, Belgium, and Singapore — are Generally Available. They are ready for your production data today.
Log into the Firebase console to create a database in Singapore, or check out our documentation to learn how to use our APIs to provision databases programmatically.
We’re delighted that the Realtime Database now has locations around the world, and we can’t wait to see what you build.
A closer look at building a web app with Flutter and Firebase
If you attended I/O this year, we hope you had some fun in the photo booth with Sparky and his friends, including Flutter's Dash, Android Jetpack and Chrome's Dino. We loved seeing all of the pictures you posted with the Google Developer mascots and your favorite props!
Firebasers having fun in the photo booth!
We partnered with the Flutter team to build the I/O photo booth in Flutter on the web, powered by Firebase. The team used Firebase Auth to support anonymous user sign-in, Firebase security rules to prevent users from modifying or deleting photos after creation, Firebase Hosting for fast and secure hosting of the web app, and Firebase storage and Cloud Functions for Firebase to create the page with your photo for social sharing. Take a closer look at how the photo booth was built using Flutter and Firebase together here!
Mobile games have evolved rapidly in recent years. Player expectations have increased along with this evolution. Players now demand games with rich and compelling stories that run smoothly regardless of their device. At the same time, as game studios realized the opportunities in going mobile, there is an ever-increasing number of mobile game titles competing for players' attention. In this increasingly competitive market, the ability to iterate and improve player experiences faster than rival titles is vital. Therefore, having the right tools and knowing how to apply them is a key skill for any game developer.
For many years, Firebase has provided game developers with the tools they need to build, release, and operate successful games. More than 2.5 million apps and games actively use Firebase every month, including global game studios such as Gameloft, Pomelo Games, and Halfbrick Studios.
This article explores four scenarios that game developers deal with on a daily basis and shows how Firebase provides the tools and insights to help you stay ahead of rivals.
1. Optimizing gaming experiences and monetization with data
It’s easier to provide better experiences to players when you understand how they interact with your game. Knowing how much time players spend in the game, what activities they prefer, and how often they come back enables you to personalize the game experience to suit their behavior and preferences. For example, different groups of players have different monetization preferences. Some may choose to spend money to improve their experience, while others may prefer to see ads and trade their time and attention instead. Understanding these differences – even details such as what people prefer to buy and what they do before making their first in-app purchase – is crucial to optimizing player experiences.
Firebase offers robust integration with Google Analytics. This integration helps shed light on who your players are and how they’re engaging with your game by providing insight into in-app events and user properties. This short video will show you how to log custom events and interpret the data to understand your players better.
Through the audiences feature, Firebase’s Google Analytics integration enables you to segment your user base in ways that are important to your business. You can use these custom audiences to filter reports to understand how different players engage with your game and identify patterns of behavior within the audience. Then, you can use this information to send targeted notifications and personalize the game behavior for player profiles. Take a look at this video to see how to set up audiences for your game.
2. Communicate with your players in their local language and time zone using push notifications
Push notifications can be used for everything from reminders about opening a chest to letting everybody know the biggest update of the year is available. As push notifications allow real-time communication between a game company and its players, they’re often a critical part of a retention and re-engagement strategy. Most successful games have players worldwide, which means choosing just one language and time of day to communicate with them all is not ideal. After all, you don’t want to annoy players by sending them a push notification at 2 a.m.
Firebase Cloud Messaging lets game developers send targeted messages and notifications, which can be customized to suit your brand and align with player preferences. This video shows how you can send push notifications to players with devices set to a particular language and schedule delivery at an appropriate local time. Firebase Cloud Messaging also lets you target by game versions, geographies, your custom audiences, and many more variables. After sending the push notifications, you can see how many were delivered, how many were opened, and, if you choose to set it up, how many conversions happened.
3. Find out the best ad formats to use and how frequently to show them
While many players will gladly invest money in the games they enjoy, other players prefer ads in exchange for the gameplay. Many games employ a hybrid monetization strategy, meaning they include both ads and in-app purchases. As a general rule, the more ad impressions, the greater the revenue generated with ads. However, many other factors need to be considered to optimize and balance user experience and revenue. Differences between ad formats, their sizes, and how often they’re shown without disrupting the game experience are important factors.
Once you decide on these factors, how can you determine if the selected formats are the best ones? Is the frequency right or too much, and is the frequency negatively impacting retention? These questions can be answered quantitatively with Firebase A/B testing. A/B testing can be used with Firebase Remote Config to experiment with different combinations of ad types and frequencies to find the best option. To set up an experiment, all you need to do is define a goal, like increase total revenue, and identify secondary metrics such as D1 and D7 retention.
This video walks you through the process of setting up an experiment to test different ad formats so you can identify the best choice for a game. These parameters will vary from game to game, so it is always good to test the options available.
Pomelo Games, one of the top game studios in Uruguay, used Firebase Remote Config and Firebase A/B Testing to test the effect of showing interstitial ads to their entire player base versus a specific segment. Then, they used Google Analytics to measure the impact on revenue and retention. They also used Firebase Crashlytics to keep an eye on their game vitals. After two weeks of testing, the Pomelo team discovered that interstitial ads led to an average 25% increase in AdMob revenue and, surprisingly, a 35% increase in in-app purchases too. In both tests, there was almost no effect on retention. (Check out the full case study.)
4. Gradually roll out game features, run LiveOps, and dynamically update your game parameters
Releasing new game features can be nerve-wracking because you may worry about how players will receive the new features. Will players enjoy the new feature you worked hard on? Will the new feature increase engagement and session time? One way to gain confidence that new features will positively impact your key metrics is by slowly rolling them out and seeing how they perform with a subset of your players before wider release.
In addition to gradually rolling out new features, it's also important to continually experiment with new content or in-game mechanics to optimize the player experience. However, constantly iterating your game can be a time-consuming and tedious process if you don't have the right tools.
Firebase Remote Config lets you dynamically configure your game and confidently roll out new features so you can deliver highly personalized experiences to your players without publishing an app update. This video shows you how to set up and tweak Remote Config parameters and instrument feature flagging.
Conclusion
Firebase is a powerful platform. It’s a great fit for game companies that want to enhance how they optimize experiences to delight their players and improve engagement and monetization. To get started with Firebase, you create your project in the Firebase console. To see more examples of how to use Firebase to supercharge your games business, check our Games with Firebase video series, where we walk through each step of the implementation process and share common use cases.
Version 7.1.0 of the Firebase Unity and C++ SDKs did a lot to improve Firebase Remote Config and better aligned it with the iOS and Android SDKs. In the process, however, there were some minor changes to the API that may require some action on your part.
Deprecation of the old API
First, in the Unity/C# SDK, the static methods you’ve been using have been removed from FirebaseRemoteConfig and moved into FirebaseRemoteConfigDeprecated. For technical reasons, we could not deprecate these functions and leave them in place. If you want a fast and easy way to update Firebase in your game, change FirebaseRemoteConfig to FirebaseRemoteConfigDeprecated. This will let your existing code work without any additional changes, but you won't be able to take advantage of the newer features.
Also worth noting is that IsDeveloperMode no longer has any effect and can be omitted. You likely paired this with a change to MinimumFetchInterfaclInMilliseconds or by passing a TimeSpan into FetchAsync when debugging Remote Config. Shorter fetch intervals now function without IsDeveloperMode making RemoteConfig an even stronger tool in your LiveOps toolbox!
C++ developers can leave their code as is, although you will be warned about deprecation.
New Features
Developers wishing to future proof their code and take advantage of new features as they become available should switch to using a Remote Config instance rather than using static functions.
Unity/C#
var remoteConfig = FirebaseRemoteConfig.DefaultInstance;
C++
auto remoteConfig = ::firebase::remote_config::RemoteConfig::GetInstance(app);
SetDefaults is now asynchronous. This is probably a good thing for game developers hoping to move logic off of the main thread, but you do have to be a little more cautious when building your app logic.
Unity/C#
remoteConfig.SetDefaultsAsync(new Dictionary<string, object>
{
{"starting_player_lives", 3},
{"theme", "dark"}
}).ContinueWithOnMainThread(task =>
{
// it's now safe to Fetch
});
C++
std::vector<remote_config::ConfigKeyValueVariant> defaultConfig = {
{"starting_player_lives", 3},
{"theme", "dark"},
};
remoteConfig->SetDefaults(defaultConfig.data(), defaultConfig.size())
.OnCompletion([](const ::firebase::Future<void>&){
// it's now safe to Fetch
});
It’s now possible to Fetch and Activate Remote Config changes in a single call.
And when you are ready to read your configuration, it’s now possible to retrieve all of the keys and values in a single language-specific native collection. No more getting a list of keys and looking up each value individually!
Finally, if you would like to debug your Remote Config settings, you may want to reduce the interval between fetches.
Unity/C#
var configSettings = new ConfigSettings();
if (Debug.isDebugBuild)
{
// refresh immediately when debugging
configSettings.MinimumFetchInternalInMilliseconds = 0;
}
FirebaseRemoteConfig.DefaultInstance.SetConfigSettingsAsync(configSettings).ContinueWithOnMainThread(task =>
{
// handle completion
});
C++
::firebase::remote_config::ConfigSettings settings;
settings.minimum_fetch_interval_in_milliseconds = 0; // caution, only do this in debug mode!
remoteConfig->SetConfigSettings(settings);
More to Come!
These changes are part of an ongoing effort to improve Remote Config, including some exciting new features you'll be hearing about in the future. Updating your games now will ensure that you can continue to take the advantage of the latest advances in Remote Config.
Even if your mobile app has been downloaded by millions of users worldwide, making it profitable in the long run is a tricky science. Most apps rely on a mix of ads and in-app purchases (IAP) to make money. The challenge is finding the right balance to maximize both revenue streams while ensuring an engaging experience for every user.
But determining your overall ad monetization strategy without negatively impacting in-app purchases isn’t a one-time effort. Between competition from other apps, changing user behavior, and evolving ad formats, you need to continually assess and experiment with your strategy to find an optimal mix. Doing so can keep users from dropping off from your app and even drive a 25% bump in total ads revenue, as mobile games publisher Pomelo Games discovered.
To tackle this challenge, you need a simple way to test and validate changes to your ads strategy in one place. And ideally, you'll want to gauge the impact of any changes on a small subset of users before rolling them out to your entire user base.
An easier, data-driven way to uncover the right approach
Linking AdMob, Firebase, and Google Analytics provides a streamlined solution to experiment with ads, and make smarter decisions based on app and ad performance insights. Here’s what each tool brings to the table:
Google AdMob provides a monetization platform that enables you to create and serve various ad formats to your users.
Firebase Remote Config and Firebase A/B Testing let you easily test and compare different ad strategies — including ad configurations, formats, and features — on a small subset of your total audience before rolling out to all users.
Google Analytics provides user engagement data like user retention, ad revenue, and in-app purchase revenue to help you evaluate your experiments.
Running A/B tests with Remote Config
Firebase Remote Config allows you to change the appearance and behavior of your app dynamically for any target audience — with no need to release an app update. For instance, you could design a new branding style for users in a certain country or region or change your app's color theme to match a seasonal promotion. You can also provide different app ad experiences, customized to different users in your app.
From there, you can use Firebase A/B Testing with Remote Config to run product and marketing experiments with variants of your app and analyze the results. This helps you make informed decisions about what’s working and whether your changes should be rolled out to more users.
Let’s say you launched a hit space shooter game and want to figure out what type of gameplay keeps users engaged — an easier version with fewer aliens to fight, or a more challenging version with fewer power-ups and a lot more monsters.
Using Remote Config, you build in the framework that enables you to add more challenging elements to your game without having to re-code and publish an entirely new version. Then, you can set up an A/B test that deploys these challenging elements to a small group of users, like your expert-level gaming audience. As part of setting up the A/B test, you choose primary and secondary metrics to optimize for, such as retention rate or total estimated revenue, and then you watch how the more challenging variant performs compared to the easier version.
And thanks to Firebase’s integration with Google Analytics, the actions that users are taking inside the app as a result of your experiments are factored into determining how well a variant performs.
Testing your way to a better ads strategy
Applied to your ads strategy, this testing framework using Firebase allows you to optimize for goals, like total ads revenue, while also tracking the impact on secondary metrics, like overall app monetization and user retention.
For instance, you might want to figure out if you can earn more ads revenue by adjusting the frequency capping without a drop in user retention. Using AdMob, you can create two ad units that vary in how often they’re shown to the user — say, one ad every 20 minutes versus one ad every five minutes. You can then use Remote Config and A/B testing to evaluate how these two different ad frequencies impact your ad revenue. You can also add secondary metrics to watch during the A/B test, like user retention and IAP revenue.
Or perhaps you’ve noticed a steady drop in ad clicks as people spend more time in your game and suspect it’s related to ad formats. For this case, you can experiment with the various ad formats in AdMob and A/B test these variants on a small number of users who spend more time in your game (an audience determined by Google Analytics). Then, when your A/B test determines which ad format increases ad clicks, you can roll out the new format more widely.
Creating the best app experience for every user
Whether you want to experiment with frequency capping to increase revenue or serve ads to a specific audience, linking AdMob with Firebase and Google Analytics leads to smarter, data-driven decisions. With insights about which users are most likely to spend money in your app, you can even fine-tune who sees an ad versus who’s encouraged to make a purchase instead.
Mobile game publishers around the world have successfully used these tools to optimize their ads and in-app purchases strategies without hindering the player experience. After hearing plenty of positive user feedback — including about the ads themselves — Four Thirty Three Inc. and Pomelo Games (mentioned earlier) were inspired to transform their entire business model, with Firebase tools at the core.
A few months ago, we released Firestore for Games into open alpha. Thanks to all of your feedback, today, we're happy to announce that Cloud Firestore for Games is now publicly available in beta for C++ and Unity developers.
Firestore is a new performant and scalable serverless database option from Firebase for all your game development needs. It can help you add guilds to your latest mobile game, build a backend for your next big turn-based game, or add realtime chat. It’s also a key component of Firebase Extensions like Translate Text and Trigger Email, making it easier than ever to deploy pre-built complex workflows to your games.
What is Cloud Firestore?
Cloud Firestore is Google’s next generation cloud NoSQL database. It’s fast, reliable, and ready to scale for whatever workload you send its way. For the past two years it’s been generally available for the Web, iOS, and Android, and now it’s available for game developers as well.
Cloud Firestore exists alongside our existing Realtime Database. We’ll continue to support Realtime Database because it still works great for when you need to share data quickly with lots of players in near realtime. With Firestore you get more advanced queries on your data, 99.999% guaranteed uptime, and support for up to a million concurrent players -- all whilst remaining fast enough for many of your gaming backend needs. If you need more help deciding which database is right for you, check out this helpful guide.
Wasn’t Cloud Firestore already available?
Even though Firestore has been generally available for some time, the existing SDKs were built with the workflows and tools favored by app and web developers. Although game developers working in languages like JavaScript, Kotlin, and Swift would have no problem adopting the existing development kits, you would’ve had to jump through hoops to access them from Unity or C++. However, here at Firebase and Google, we want to make it easy for game developers to build, release, and operate games. So, we've built SDKs that bring game developers the same levels of convenience that app developers enjoy.
What’s changed since Alpha?
The Beta tag means that we believe that the Firestore SDKs for Unity and C++ are now stable enough that game developers can confidently use them in shipping games. Bugs and small API tweaks may crop up here and there as more developers pick it up, but Firestore is now a viable option when starting new game projects.
A big improvement that alpha testers might notice is that the new libraries have full feature parity with the platform specific Firestore SDKs. This includes many features alpha testers have asked for, such as OnSnapshotsInSync and support for the Blob data type. All transforms (like incrementing values) and query types (like "array-contains-any") are now implemented as well. We’ve also worked to make Firestore more consistent with the other Unity Firebase SDKs by ensuring that events fire on the main thread and adding more consistency to error reporting.
Since we’ve seen that many game developers tend to target multiple platforms with a single codebase, we’ve ensured that every feature in Firestore SDK C++ SDK works identically on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux. This means that you can develop your game logic on a desktop computer with access to the entire Firestore for games feature set, and remain confident that it will continue to function on your target device. We've also fully opened sourced the C++ SDK so you can easily build, debug, and port your code to wherever you need.
How do I get it?
This Firestore beta, like the alpha, ships with the standard Firebase C++ and Unity SDKs. To use it, simply ensure you’re using the latest Firebase SDK either by downloading the C++ zip or the Unity zip. Remember, if you come across any bugs, report them to us through our support channel or on the C++ or Unity issue pages.
Firebase Extensions are a convenient way to add new functionality to your app with the click of a button. They are pre-packaged solutions for common problems that you can easily add to your Firebase app. Extensions are based on Firebase and Google Cloud products that you already know and use.
On the Firebase Extensions page, you will find a collection of official extensions for features that developers find themselves in need of regularly, such as resizing images, sending emails based on the contents of Firestore documents, translating text, shortening URLs, and more. Most of these extensions have been built and tested by the Firebase team, and follow best practices. In addition, we have teamed up with partners like Stripe to bring you extensions for processing payments and sending invoices.
Installing extensions is easy via the Firebase console or the Firebase command line interface.
Firebase Experimental Extensions
To allow us to get more feedback from you and to better understand which use cases and extension features people are most interested in, we are launching a new type of extensions: Experimental Extensions.
These are fully functional extensions that we think you'll find useful, but they haven't yet gone through the same amount of testing and polish as the official published extensions.
The following extensions are built by our engineers looking for feedback from the community.
Shortening links using Firebase Dynamic Links
Performing sentiment analysis on text in Firestore documents
Adding custom claims to Firebase Auth users
Scheduled writes to Firestore documents
... and more coming soon!
To install an experimental extension, navigate to the extension's README file in the Firebase Experimental Extensions repo on GitHub, and then click on the Install on Firebase button. This will take you to the Firebase Console, where you can then select the project you'd like to install this extension in.
You can also install extensions via the command line. To do so, make sure you've got the Firebase Command Line tools installed, then run the following command:
This command will install the Shorten URLs with Dynamic Links experimental extension in your project.
We love to hear your feedback, and we're looking forward to seeing what you will build using the new experimental extensions! Use the GitHub issue tracker of the experimental extensions repository to leave feedback.
If you'd like to submit PRs to improve an experimental extension, you will need access to the extension authoring tools. To learn more about this, join our Alpha program.
Community Extensions
From conversations with you, we know you're excited to build and share your own extensions.
To share extensions with other developers, you need to become an Extension Publisher. Register as a publisher by joining the Firebase Alpha program, and indicate you're interested in building Community Extensions in the comments field. You can then publish your extensions under your publisher ID.
Your extension code will live in Firebase, so other alpha group members can install your extension directly from the command line.
At the moment, Community Extensions can only be shared with members of the Firebase Alpha program, but we're working hard to let you share your extensions publicly.
To extend where no Firebaser has gone before
We're excited to share these two new kinds of extensions with you, and we can't wait to see what you're going to build!
Today we launched TWO new features for the Firebase Realtime Database in beta.
First, we launched a new region for the Realtime Database, in Belgium, in addition to our existing region in the United States. If you would like to store your customer data in Europe, or if you’d like to reduce latency for customers in this part of the world, you can do so today.
Second, we launched a management API for the Realtime Database. With just a REST request you can list, create, update, delete, disable, and re-enable Realtime Database instances.
Once you upgrade your Firebase project to our pay as you go plan, it can contain many Realtime Database instances. You can use multiple database instances to scale beyond the limits of a single database instance, balance load, optimize performance, and more. You can even have a mix of database instances in the United States and Belgium in a single project.
Using the new API, adding another Realtime Database instance to a project is as simple as running curl. You can specify either us-central1 (United States) or europe-west1 (Belgium) for location-id.
We get this response, showing both our default Realtime Database instance (with type DEFAULT_DATABASE) and the new one we just created (type USER_DATABASE)
You can use similar calls to disable, re-enable, and delete instances. Have a look at the documentation to learn more about the commands.
This API is available now, and we have enabled it on existing Firebase projects that have used the Realtime Database in the past month. If you ever use the Google Cloud console, you’ll see the API listed there as well. The Firebase console will soon let you create databases in Belgium as well.
We’re excited about these big advances for the Realtime Database, and we hope you are too!
Getting your internal team to run the most recent pre-release build of your app is critical to receiving feedback on the latest features you’re getting ready to ship. However, testers receive a lot of emails on a daily basis and sometimes miss out on an email notification about a new build. This means your testers might be running old builds and sending you bug reports for an issue that’s already been fixed.
With the App Distribution iOS SDK, open sourced and available today, testers receive in-app alerts when a new build is available. Right from your test app, testers can install the update and quickly start running the latest build.
In-app alert of new release within test app
Like App Distribution, the iOS SDK was built with flexibility top-of-mind, giving you the option to customize the full user experience to make it feel like a natural extension of your app.
We’ve been working with a number of companies over the past few months, incorporating their feedback and understanding how they’re using the App Distribution iOS SDK. Twitter, who had previously used a similar feature with Fabric’s Crashlytics Beta, has integrated the SDK into their nightly builds to make sure testers can easily access the latest update. We sat down with Twitter iOS engineer, Mateusz Dzwonek, to learn more about their experience:
Why did the Twitter Release Team decide to use the Firebase App Distribution iOS SDK?
One of the main goals for our Twitter employee app is to catch bugs before they go to the public Twitter app. We always try to make it as easy as possible for people to install and update this app to the latest version, but it can get out of date pretty quickly with how often we ship new versions. In the past, we relied on sending emails to have our users update the app, which put the burden on the user to always keep up with it. But thanks to the Firebase App Distribution SDK, we were able to simplify the process by showing users if they are on the latest version and allowing them to update from the app instead of having to click on a link in an email.
How did the team use the Firebase App Distribution iOS SDK to improve your testing release process?
Before Firebase, we would check if the user was on the latest version and if not, we’d display a prompt that started an immediate update. We know that most of our users launch the app to complete a specific task, and forcing them to close the app to update it can be frustrating. So one of the most important features we were able to add to our app was a new and improved update mechanism which was possible with the Firebase App Distribution SDK. Now we’ve added an option to install the update when they close the app, and it has reduced the amount of time it takes for the latest version to reach the majority of users by nearly 20%.
Wrap Up
We hope Twitter’s success story highlights the importance of improving your tester’s experience by giving them the flexibility to install your latest pre-release versions right from your test app. We’re excited to hear about how other companies use the App Distribution iOS SDK as part of their internal testing workflow. To get started, check out our docs to set up in-app build alerts. Happy testing!
We know that the web is one of the largest platforms developed on across the globe. We want to meet developers where they are, no matter what platform that may be using.
At I/O earlier this year, we announced Firebase Performance Monitoring for web. It was our next big step in bringing the complete suite of Firebase products to the web. And just a few weeks ago, at the Firebase Summit, we announced support for web apps in Google Analytics, Cloud Messaging and Remote Config! These new features give you insight into your web users, what they are doing inside your app, and help you create personalized experiences for them - just like you already do on native. Let’s take a closer look at all that is new for web developers in Firebase.
Google Analytics
At the heart of a successful app and business strategy lies data. Analytics helps you understand how your user base is growing, who these users are, and what actions they are taking in your app. You can then use these insights to build tailored experiences that will delight, engage and retain your users.
If you're already comfortable using Google Analytics for your native apps, the web version of Analytics should look very familiar to you. But if you are new to Firebase, there are a few key components in Analytics we want to highlight:
The Analytics Dashboard, which displays key performance indicators such as daily or monthly active users, revenue, and session engagement metrics. Also, these can be filtered along multiple dimensions such as app version, device model or any of your app data streams - and now web data is one of them too.
Detailed events reports allow you to dive one level deeper by giving you event-level insight into any event you are logging as well as any associated registered parameters
Retention reports that help you see how well you are retaining your users
StreamView, which gives you an overview of where and when user engagement is happening in real time
Analytics also has a feature called audiences, which provides a way to segment users along attributes that are meaningful to you. For example, you can create an audience comprising all the users who performed a specific sequence of events in your app. These audiences now also work for users on the web, and membership can even be evaluated across multiple platforms by setting the user_id in the Analytics SDK.
Let’s take the example of an e-commerce app and a product review feature. One important thing to track in such an app is users who started writing a product review, and then left without completing it. Using audiences, we can create a user segment that represents exactly this group of users.
Example sequence of events
“Started session” > “Started review” > “Canceled review”
We can create an audience representing that sequence in the Audience builder shown in the screenshot below:
In the next two sections we will show you how to combine audiences with Remote Config & Cloud Messaging to create personalized experiences for your users.
Remote Config
Remote Config (now works on web) gives you the power to alter your app for any segment of users without requiring you to release a new build. For example, you can segment users by geo and date (like Christmas) and infuse a holiday color palette into your app.
Going back to the product review example, say you want to show a custom message when any user who’s part of the “Abandoned reviewers” audience opens the app. You can now use that audience as the targeting condition for your Remote Config parameters across both your web and native apps. You could even strategically roll out new features to target audiences across web and native, so you can monitor regression and roll it back if you run into any issues.
Cloud Messaging
Cloud Messaging has already been available for web for quite some time. What's new is that FCM for web is now integrated with Google Analytics, which allows you to send targeted notifications to your users based on their behavior in your app. You can do this by leveraging both new web specific signals (like browser type) and Google Analytics’ custom audiences and user properties. It’s another great way for you to personalize your users’ app experiences.
What’s also new is that campaigns can be easily configured in the Firebase console. Additionally, the funnel report that tracks campaign success also now works for web campaigns. All you need to do is specify an Analytics conversion event when setting up your campaign and the report will track success automatically.
Let’s go back to our favorite product review example. Now that we have a way to identify the audience who haven’t completed their reviews, we can re-engage them with tailored notifications for users on the native app as well as users on the web app. Since the audience is already being populated by Google Analytics with these user segments, you now simply have to go to Firebase Cloud Messaging in the Firebase console and create a campaign which sends a message to these audiences on their respective platforms.
Once we’ve started our messaging re-engagement campaign, we can use Google Analytics to create closed funnels to view the performance of the engagement workflow on any specific platform.
How to get started with all the new web features
To use any of what we just described you, take a look at the instructions for implementing and integrating the web analytics SDK here. One important note is that if you are already using analytics for your native apps, you will first need to upgrade to the full Google Analytics experience in order to access web analytics. The Remote Config SDK for web is currently in Beta and you can access it here. To get started with FCM for web, simply follow the instructions here.
Wrap up
We hope you’re as excited about these new web features as we are. The above example illustrates one way you can use the new web analytics features to improve your web app experience and engage users, but there are many more ways these features can be used together. We can’t wait to hear what use cases you’ve implemented in your own web apps. As always, you can reach out to us on StackOverflow and through our official support page to let us know and give us feedback. Happy Developing!