At Firebase, our mission is to help mobile and web developers succeed, but with over 2 million apps actively using Firebase every month, we know that success means different things to different developers. For example, to Le Figaro, the oldest and largest French newspaper, success means increasing paid subscriptions significantly with the help of a combination of Firebase products. For Mighty Immersion, a three person startup on a journey to improve patient care with VR technology, success means scaling their apps to more hospitals as fast as possible using Firebase backend products.

Stories like these are what inspire us to continue investing in our developer community. We all benefit from a vibrant and open ecosystem that helps bring ideas to life.

We’re excited to be in Madrid at the fourth annual Firebase Summit to hear about what you’re building, and share updates on how we’re simplifying your app development workflows and infrastructure needs. Read on to learn about everything that’s new at Firebase Summit 2019! You can also check out the keynote and sessions on our YouTube channel or the summit website.

New tools for building better mobile and web apps

Save time on everyday development tasks with Firebase Extensions

Repetitive app development tasks can slow you down, leaving less time for creating amazing user experiences. To save you time, we’re thrilled to introduce Firebase Extensions, pre-packaged bundles of code designed to automate common tasks in your projects. Whether you want to resize an image, add people to an email list or shorten URLs, we’ve built an array of solutions that you can easily deploy to your projects. There’s no need to write or debug code–it’s all done for you, but you still have the flexibility to configure extensions for your specific use cases. Firebase Extensions are open-source and integrate seamlessly with other Firebase and Google Cloud Platform products. Starting today, you can discover extensions suited to your specific use cases on the Extensions Directory page on our website or Firebase Extensions GitHub repository.

Launch extensions available in Firebase Console

Increase your development velocity with the Firebase Emulator Suite

The Firebase Emulator Suite is a fast, rich and safe environment that provides you with a set of local tools for building your next app or feature. Based on your feedback, we’ve expanded the functionality of our emulator suite to include hot reloading for changes to Security Rules and added broader support for client and server side SDKs. We’ve also included support for Realtime Database triggered Functions and developed a new command to tighten how it works with CI. Learn more here.

Firebase Emulator suite now supports Realtime Database & broader client and server side SDKS

Improved app quality and user engagement

Enhance app stability and usability before publishing with Firebase App Distribution

Building apps inevitably comes with bugs, which are important to address before your app is live so they don’t affect the user experience, or your ratings and reviews. Today, we’re excited to announce Firebase App Distribution, which gives you an easy and flexible way to distribute pre-release versions of your apps to trusted testers. App Distribution provides one central hub where you can distribute both iOS and Android test apps. You can also build pre-release testing into your existing workflows with CLI support for Gradle, fastlane and the Firebase CLI. There’s no SDK to install, forms to fill out or review process to go through. Get started with Firebase App Distribution here.

Send pre-release versions of your app to trusted testers via the Firebase console

Expand your web app capabilities with Google Analytics, Firebase Remote Config and Firebase Cloud Messaging

Once your app is running, the next step is to understand your users and identify ways to increase engagement. Users often interact with your business across multiple touch points and on different devices, so today we’re excited to announce we're expanding our integration with Google Analytics to include support for the web. You can now use the powerful analytics features you’ve enjoyed for native mobile apps–like the ability to segment your audience, trigger actions, and record events and user properties–for web apps. This makes it easier to understand how users are interacting with your apps, no matter what device or platform they're on. You’ll also now have access to closed funnels just a click away in the Google Analytics UI. And with our recently-upgraded audiences feature, you can create a more personalized experience for your web users with Remote Config or Firebase Cloud Messaging, which are now also available for web.

Google Analytics now supports web apps

Easily forecast user behavior with Firebase Predictions

Last year we launched Firebase Predictions into general availability, letting you apply the power of machine learning to your app analytics and create smart segments of your users based on their predicted future behavior. We’ve made some recent improvements to the Predictions experience to give you more information and more control. Most significantly, we’ve updated the Predictions interface so you can see the full spectrum of your user’s predicted behavior and target any segment of users depending on your use case. Learn more here.

Increased control, flexibility and transparency

Peek under the hood with more open-sourced SDKs

We believe an open platform is essential to creating powerful software and a connected community. Over the past few months, we’ve open-sourced four additional iOS libraries and four additional Android libraries. Today we’re open-sourcing the new Web SDK releases for Remote Config and Analytics. We’ve also worked closely with Invertase, a company that has created a comprehensive React Native library for Firebase, to ensure their libraries cover all Firebase products. The new React Native Firebase v6 release adds support for every Firebase service and includes a new documentation website, quick start guides, and upgraded SDKs. Get started here.

Limit access to your Firebase projects

In addition to making our platform more open, we’re also making sure you have the right processes in place to keep your data secure. To help you do this, we’re happy to share Firebase Roles and Permissions has graduated into general availability. This battle-tested system lets you use either predefined Firebase roles or create your own custom roles in order to limit access to your Firebase projects and data to the appropriate people. Learn more here.

Other exciting news from Firebase Summit 2019

Reduce test run time with Firebase Test Lab

We’ve made improvements to Firebase Test Lab that allow you to speed up tests with Test Sharding. Test Sharding enables you to divide tests into subgroups (shards), and run them in parallel. Learn more here.

Update on Fabric migration

With the launch of App Distribution, we’ve completed our journey to bring the best of Fabric to Firebase. All of the Fabric features you love can now be accessed in Firebase, and to take advantage of the latest updates, we recommend migrating your Fabric apps and teammates to Firebase today. The Fabric dashboard will sunset on March 31st 2020 and an early migration will ensure that you’re set up for success in your new home. Get started here.

Hello 2020 & beyond!

We're continuing to invest in Firebase to provide a more helpful platform that simplifies your app development workflows and infrastructure needs, so you can focus on building amazing user experiences. As we continue to grow and enhance the platform, we'd love to get your feedback. Join our Alpha program to get a sneak peek of what we're building next, share your thoughts with us, and help shape the future of Firebase.

Today, we’re delighted to announce that we’ve doubled the concurrent connections limit for the Firebase Realtime Database from 100k to 200k. This takes effect today, for all existing databases and new projects. And while this level of scalability will be enough for the majority of projects out there, some of you might want to support even more concurrent users. For that, you might want to consider sharding your database.

Many kinds of apps can scale much higher by sharding their data across multiple Realtime Database instances in a single project. The 200k concurrent user limit applies to each individual database, so the total number of concurrent connections increases linearly as you add more instances.

Sharding is a good strategy to employ when each client interacts with isolated parts of the database. Imagine a virtual whiteboard app, which is the sort of high-frequency, low-latency collaboration app for which the Realtime Database really excels. Whiteboard sessions don’t interact with each other -- just with the handful of users that are drawing together. So they can be sharded across an unlimited number of instances. When multiple users create a session, your app could assign that session to a random shard; then the clients only need to be connected to that database in order to receive their realtime updates.

Most IoT apps can also take advantage of sharding. If you want to have a gigantic number of tiny sensors sending periodic updates, they probably don’t all need to write to the same RTDB instance. You can create lots of shards (we support up to 1000), and assign each sensor to a shard. If you're interested in working with multiple versions of the Realtime Database in the same project, make sure to check out our documentation.

Of course, if you're looking for a powerful realtime database that scales without sharding, we still recommend our newer database, Cloud Firestore, for most new projects. It has the same magical realtime, offline, serverless functionality as the Realtime Database, but has been architected for higher reliability, has more powerful queries, and locations around the world.

Nonetheless, there are some use cases for which the Realtime Database is the right choice, even for new applications. That’s why we’re continuing to invest in making it even better for these purposes.

When should you pick the Realtime Database for a new project? The short answer is that if you are building an application that will have lots of tiny operations, the Realtime Database may be less expensive and more performant. For the whiteboarding app, you’d want to send lots of frequent little updates as the users draw on the whiteboard, and you’d want latency to be as low as possible. In the IoT case, performance may not be as important, but the Realtime Database may end up cheaper than Cloud Firestore if you are sending a massive stream of tiny writes.

Of course, you can use both Cloud Firestore and the Realtime Database together in the same project — we encourage it! For instance, you can use the Realtime Database to power the live whiteboard feature, but then persist the whiteboard contents to Firestore periodically to take advantage of its 99.999% availability and less expensive storage.

We hope you are excited about the increased scaling capabilities of the Realtime Database. And we also hope this guidance helps you decide between Cloud Firestore and the Realtime Database for new projects. As always if you have any questions, feel free to reach out on StackOverflow, or the firebase-talk discussion group.

Keeping an eye out for issues that affect your app’s stability is crucial, but we also know that you can’t spend your entire day staring at the Firebase Crashlytics console.

From the beginning, Crashlytics has given developers the ability to turn on stability alerts so they can be notified when issues increase in impact and severity. Developers have the power to customize these notifications so they're delivered at the right time and channel for maximum visibility - channels where developers already spend their time.

In this blog post, we'll review the types of alerts Crashlytics provides and our recommendations on how to configure them based on observations from customers.

Types Of Alerts

Let’s start by reviewing the different types of alerts Crashlytics sends. Currently, Crashlytics sends five alerts: new fatal issue, new non-fatal issue, trending issues, regression, and velocity alerts.

New issue alerts let you know the first time a new crash has occurred. We filter out the noise of repeated crashes, but give you the full stream of unique crashes by stack trace grouping. These alerts are turned off by default to avoid over inundating you, because as your app grows, you could get tons of alerts for every new version. We recommend turning these on for teams interested in knowing about every new type of crash, and for QA teams chasing down crashes found in testing versions of their apps.

Regression detection alerts you when a previously closed issue re-occurs in a new app version, which is a signal that something else may be awry and you should pay close attention to it.

Trending issues digest is sent out to developers in two instances 1) When Crashlytics detects a new crash is beginning to gain momentum (called emerging issues) 2) When Crashlytics detects new top crashes that have climbed to close to the top of your issue list recently (called trending issues). This daily email is on by default, and is a great way to keep track of emerging issues in your app.

One of the most important alerts within Crashlytics is the velocity alert, which notifies you when an issue suddenly increases in severity and impacts a significant percentage of your users. However, we recognize that every app is unique and the one-size-fits-all alerting threshold might not be what’s best for you and your business. That’s why you can now customize velocity alerts and determine how often and when you want to be alerted about changes to your app’s stability.

You can learn more about customizing velocity alerts here.

Now that you know the different notification types in Crashlytics, you can begin to build your alerting plan.

Choosing your channels

Firebase Crashlytics offers several channels to receive the above alerts. The first two channels are email and in-console alerts.

To setup these alerts:

1. Click 🔔 Firebase alerts in the upper-right corner of the Firebase console
2. Click the gear icon ⚙️ for settings
3. Choose the project that you want to receive email alerts for
4. Check relevant boxes to choose whether you'd like alerts in the Firebase Console, over email, or both

Next, you can set up notifications through Slack, Jira or PagerDuty. To set up these alerts, you need to do two things: integrate Slack / Jira / PagerDuty with your Firebase project, and then choose your triggers.

For Slack:

1. Navigate to your project settings and click into the Integrations tab
2. Next, setup your Slack connection by providing a webhook URL, a channel name, and a username for posting
   

3. Finally, choose your triggers. You can get notifications for new fatals and non-fatals as well as regressed issues and velocity alerts
   

There are two ways to create Jira issues from Crashlytics issues:

1. Automatic issue creation. Firebase can create Jira issues in response to Crashlytics events such as new Issue, regressed issues and velocity alerts
2. You can create new Jira tickets for a Crashlytics issue, by clicking a button on the Crashlytics console

Here’s how you enable the Jira integration:

1. Navigate to the Crashlytics issue you'd like to link to a Jira issue
2. Click Link to Jira
3. Either click Create issue in Project, or paste your Jira issue URL or issue key in the space below

Our PagerDuty integration is setup similarly.

Recommendations based on how customers use them

We find that a lot of our users get different utility out of each channel. In Slack, teams frequently set up a channel to show a real-time feed of all new issues, as a way to loosely monitor new issues coming up. Developers with an interest in specific pieces of code can then click through to get more detail on the issues they’re interested in. This is a pattern that seems to work well for most teams.

In Jira, we see developers using the manual integration option to create issues when they know their team is ready to take on that work. In addition, teams also setup automatic triggers for velocity alerts and regressions as those are known higher priority issues to look into.

And for PagerDuty, most teams focus on velocity alerts, which provide insight into the most critical situations your users are experiencing. For teams with even more custom use cases, we recommend developers integrate Crashlytics with Cloud Functions.

By setting up alerting in Crashlytics, you can rest assured that you’ll be alerted when critical issues occur in your app and be ready to take action when needed. For more about Crashlytics check out our docs here.

Notifications are all about getting the user’s attention at the right place and at the right time, leading them to the most important places in your app. Having richer content in your notifications can make them stand out to your users, and increase the chances that they engage with your app. In this blog post, we'll discuss several ways to make your notifications more interesting to your users by:

• Including images into your notifications
• Using new notification parameters available for Android users
  

Recently, the Firebase Cloud Messaging team added image support for notifications on both iOS and Android platforms. We've also added 12 parameters on Android which let you easily craft fun and rich notifications with minimal effort.

Adding images to your notifications

You can now add images to your notifications, as shown in the figure below. These can help make your notifications a lot livelier, and provide a visual context for your notification that can match with your app. For example, if you're developing a video streaming app, a notification that includes movie poster images for new releases could be a great way for your notification to get more attention. If you're an e-commerce app developer, notifying your user with the picture of the product they've been waiting for could help encourage them to make the purchase.

Figure 1: Image notifications on iOS platform

Figure 2: On Android, images show up in both the notification tray when your notification is expanded, as well as when that notification is opened.

How to send notifications with images

Step 1: Draft a notification with an image URL

The first thing you need to do is to prepare a notification with an image URL. From the Firebase console, you’ll be presented with two options when you are composing a notification:

Option 1 - You can enter a URL to the image you want to use;

Option 2 - You can upload a local image directly to your notification composer.

If you are using the HTTP v1 API, you will need to provide a public URL to the image parameter in the JSON body for the notification you’re sending. If you like, you can use Cloud Storage for Firebase to upload an image and get a public URL for the image from there.

When you copy and paste the public image URL or upload your image directly to the notification composer, the newly updated notification composer will render a preview of the image on the notification for each platform, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: The newly updated notification composer helps you easily visualize the image layout for your notifications

Step 2: Download the latest SDKs

Download the latest Messaging SDKs for Android and iOS and rebuild your app with the new dependencies. When a notification that includes an image URL is delivered to the device, the messaging SDK will download the image and attach it to the notification. If the image cannot be downloaded due to the size of the image or availability of the network, the FCM client will display the notification without rendering the image.

Note that in order to send notifications with images or other media files on iOS, you will need to enable service extensions for the iOS platform. We’ll cover that next. If you are an Android developer, you’re already all set for sending notifications!

Step 3: Call the new Messaging ExtensionHelper API

To receive notifications with media files in iOS, you will need to add a Notification Service Extension target in your project. The extension is available starting from iOS 10+ and supports media files like images, videos and gifs! To use videos and gifs, you will have to upload them to Cloud Storage for Firebase first and copy and paste the public URLs of those files in the Notification composer, or to the JSON image parameter in the HTTP v1 API.

When a notification is first received on a client device, the Notification Service Extension intercepts the message and allows developers to modify it before it becomes visible to users. At this point is when you will call the Firebase Messaging ExtensionHelper API to let the iOS SDK handle downloading and attaching the media files for you. Keep in mind, the processing time available for a service extension is short-lived, so if the media file is too big to download or process, the client might not complete attaching it to the notification before it is sent. When network availability is limited or slow, or the image is too large, the service extension might simply complete without an image included since it wasn’t able to finish downloading it.

You can follow these steps in Apple Documents to create a notification service extension target. Next, modify the last call in didReceiveNotificationRequest:withContentHandler: by doing the following: instead of completing it with the contentHandler(self.bestAttemptContent), call the FIRMessaging extensionHelper API. This will allow the Messaging SDK to handle downloading the image and completing the handler for you.

@interface NotificationService () <NSURLSessionDelegate>
@property(nonatomic) void (^contentHandler)(UNNotificationContent *contentToDeliver);
@property(nonatomic) UNMutableNotificationContent *bestAttemptContent;
@end

@implementation NotificationService

- (void)didReceiveNotificationRequest:(UNNotificationRequest *)request withContentHandler:(void (^)(UNNotificationContent * _Nonnull))contentHandler {
    self.contentHandler = contentHandler;
    self.bestAttemptContent = [request.content mutableCopy];

    // Modify the notification content here as you wish
    self.bestAttemptContent.title = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@ [modified]",
    self.bestAttemptContent.title];

  // Call FIRMessaging extension helper API.
  [[FIRMessaging extensionHelper] populateNotificationContent:self.bestAttemptContent
                                            withContentHandler:contentHandler];

}

Code sample on how to call FIRMessaging extension helper API to attach image to your notification.

Figure 4: An example of a gif notification received on iOS platform.

Step 4: Start sending notifications with images!

That’s it! Go ahead and start sending notifications with some fun images!

Enhance your notifications using new additional parameters for Android

Firebase Cloud Messaging now gives you more options to enhance notifications and do things like enabling the default sound and vibration pattern, controlling whether your notifications show on locked screens or not, and more. To enable these features, you’ll just need to add additional parameters to your notifications using the HTTP Send API. Below are all the new parameters we’ve introduced in this release. You can check which Android API levels support which parameter features by checking out the documentation here.

{
  "ticker" : "this is a ticker text",
  "event_time": "2000-01-01T00:00:00Z",
  // dismiss on click
  "sticky": false,
  // won't show on bridged devices such as Android wear watches. Only show on target device 
  "local_only": true,  
  // require the user's prompt attention. Ex: earthquake alert 
  "priority": "PRIORITY_MAX",
  // vibrate pattern being off 1s, on 1s, off 4s, 8s
  "vibrate_timings": ["1s", "2s", "4s", "8s"],  
  // won't show on a locked screen. Ex: no show on direct booted devices 
  "visibility": "VISIBILITY_PRIVATE"  
  "light_settings": 
"color": 
{ 
"red": 0.2, // amount of red in the color
"green": 0.4, // amount of green in the color
"blue": 1  // amount of blue in the color
		"alpha": 0.8 // almost solid color
},
"light_on_duration": "1s",
"light_off_durtaion": "2s" 
}
}

Let’s look at some new possibilities and use cases for different notifications using these new parameters!

Notifying about an event? Set a time!

Often, developers send notifications that inform users about events with an absolute time reference, like a limited-time sale a concert date. However, the time that the notification actually gets delivered may not always match up with the event time for the content of that notification. For instance, let’s say a short-lasting Firebase pizza sale notification is delivered to a device in airplane mode. When the device regains connectivity, the notification will be displayed with a timestamp of the time the notification was received as the device got back online. That received notification time will be misleading if the sale has already expired, leaving the user misinformed.

By default, notifications are time-stamped with the system time at the moment they are received on the device. If they are not the time value you wish to have for your notifications, you can override the timestamp value by setting event_time. In addition, setting event_time can be useful since notifications are sorted in the notification drawer by the event time indicating when they were received. For example, if you're a sports app developer and send play by plays for major games via notifications to your users, you'll want these to show up in chronological order in the notification tray for your users. Setting event_time will help you accomplish just that.

Note that to represent a point in time independent of any time zone or calendar, we use the UTC Epoch time defined by the Timestamp object.

Set notification vibrate pattern and lights to brand your product

Most modern Android devices have vibration capabilities and some have LED lights that can be used for notifications. These can provide physical and visual cues for your customers to distinguish your app from others. You can set both settings with the light_settings and vibrate_timings parameters.

If you want to set a sound and vibrate pattern for a notification without spending a lot of time configuring it, just set defaultSound and defaultVibrateTimings to true and you’ll be set to go.

Something Important happening? Set a high priority!

Like all other information, notifications have varying levels of importance.The higher the importance of a notification, the more prioritized and interruptive notifications will be. You can set notification importance by setting notification_priority.

Note that notification_priority is different from AndroidMessagePriority. The former one controls the UI behavior of the notifications on the device. The latter one is an FCM concept that controls when the message is delivered. See FCM guides for more information.

Private notification? Hide it from lock screen.

Some notifications may carry sensitive content. As a developer, you might want to control the level of visibility for notifications posted by your app on a secure locked screen. Now you can set visibility to control how notifications are displayed on a locked screen.

Figure 5. Notifications on the lock screen with sensitive content hidden

Set custom notification count

By default, each notification received for your app increments a notification number displayed on the long-press menu for your app launcher icon , but you can override this number for your app. For example, this might be useful if you're using just one notification to represent multiple new messages but you want the count here to represent the number of total new messages. You can set the notification count by setting the field of “notification_count”

Figure 6 Notification badges and the long-press menu with notification count

Try it out!

We highly recommend that you start incorporating images into your notifications to make them richer and more engaging on iOS and Android, and enhancing them even further with notification parameters for Android ! As always, if you have any questions or feedback from us, please reach out on StackOverflow or our official support page.