Here at Firebase, we believe developers play an instrumental role in helping people learn, live better, go places, and grow businesses. That’s why we’re committed to providing you with integrated, easy-to-use, and extensible tools so you can continue to create experiences that billions of people not only rely on, but love.
Millions of apps actively use Firebase every month, created by businesses of all sizes, from startups to global enterprises. Your trust in us is what motivates and inspires us to make Firebase even better. Today, Firebase Summit is returning as a virtual event and we’re excited to unveil updates to our platform that will help you accelerate app development, run your app with confidence, and scale with ease. Read on for more details on what’s new, and don’t forget to check out all of the great content (including technical sessions, demos, pathways, and more) from the summit on our event website!
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Gain actionable insights to run your app with confidence
Scale with ease by using powerful engagement tools
Firebase helps you get your app up and running by providing fully-managed infrastructure, with a streamlined experience, that lets you focus on what matters most.
Firebase Extensions are pre-packaged bundles of code that automate common development tasks and let you add functionality to your app in fewer steps. We’ve been partnering with companies you know and trust so you can integrate multiple services without learning new APIs. Our friends at Stripe recently added one-time payments and an SDK to their Run Payments with Stripe extension. Plus, they just launched a new feature that lets you accept over 15 different payment methods including wallets, bank redirects, and "Buy now, Pay later" within your app.
We’re also unveiling new Extensions for adding critical e-commerce features to your app in less time. These Extensions can help you ship and track merchandise with ShipEngine, re-engage users who abandon their shopping carts with SendGrid emails or SMS messages via Twilio, and implement search on Cloud Firestore with Elastic. You can even add a single interface to accept payments from multiple providers through Google Pay - which is especially handy if you’re launching your app internationally. For more details, go to the Firebase Extensions page and install them today! And if you need inspiration to get started, check out the code for our sample app on GitHub that uses over 17 different Extensions and view the deployed version at: https://karas-coffee.web.app/.
These new Extensions, built by our partners in collaboration with Firebase, help you add e-commerce features to your app much faster
We’re excited to announce that Firebase now offers beta level support for tvOS and macOS! This means you can use your favorite Firebase products to build and run apps that are compatible with Apple TVs and Macbooks - from a single codebase - and deliver a great, cross-device experience to users with less hassle. For example, when you add the Crashlytics SDK, you can identify critical crashes and even filter crashes by Apple device type or operating system right from the Firebase Crashlytics console.
With enhanced support for Apple platforms, you can deliver a smooth cross-device experience
If you’re a game developer, you’ll be happy to learn that many of our C++ SDKs now support Apple TV, so you can develop phenomenal Apple Arcade games with Firebase! On top of that, we’re expanding support for game frameworks and engines by making Cloud Firestore available for Unity and C++. This lets you add the power of Cloud Firestore to your game in seconds to store and sync your game data in near real-time, add offline support, and scale your game experience to support thousands of players.
Cloud Firestore is now available for Unity and C++, giving you real-time data synchronization capabilities and offline support
We’ve also made a number of big improvements to Crashlytics’ Unity and NDK SDKs to make it easier to debug your game’s codebase. Now, Crashlytics tracks a wider range of native crash types, and includes IL2CPP support for Unity games to show more symbolicated C++ frames that can be mapped to your C# code.
Finally, with the latest release of Dartpad, Flutter’s online editor, you can use Flutter and Firebase together to develop apps that reach users across platforms with just your browser. Flutter is Google's open source framework for building beautiful, natively compiled, multi-platform apps from a single codebase. It's a natural complement to Firebase's cross-platform backend services. Today, Dartpad supports Cloud Firestore and Firebase Authentication, with other Firebase products coming soon! Go to dartpad.dev and import the Firebase packages to get started. You can also take a look at our sample app.
Dartpad, Flutter’s online editor, now gives you support for Firebase right out of the box
A few months ago, we introduced you to App Check, which provides a powerful layer of security for your backend infrastructure. It does this by attesting that incoming traffic is coming from your app on a legitimate device, and blocking traffic that doesn't have valid credentials. Today, App Check can do even more because we’ve made three major updates.
First, you can now use App Check to protect access to Cloud Firestore (with Firestore Web SDK support coming soon), in addition to Cloud Storage for Firebase, Realtime Database and Cloud Functions for Firebase that we announced previously. Second, we’ve added custom server protections so you can use App Check with any custom backend resources. It even integrates with API Management Platforms like Apigee and CDNs like CloudFlare. Third, we’ve expanded the number of attestation providers App Check supports to now include Apple’s app attestation provider App Attest and reCAPTCHA Enterprise. Register your app with App Check today and start enforcing protections through the Firebase console. To learn more about App Check, check out our documentation.
App Check protects your app and user data
We’re launching detailed documentation that specifies what data each Firebase product collects and shares to help you comply with Google Play’s upcoming safety policies. Our goal is to build upon Google’s commitment to privacy and transparency, and give you a head start to prepare for Google Play’s new data safety section, which launches to app users next year.
The above image is an example only and subject to change
With Firebase, you can monitor your app’s performance and stability, test changes, and get insight on how you can resolve issues to deliver the best experience possible.
Firebase Performance Monitoring gathers and presents data about your app’s performance, so you know exactly what’s happening in your app –and when users are experiencing slowness– from their point of view. However, no matter how thoroughly you test your app on your local machine, your app can still run into latency issues because users will access it on different devices, from different countries, and on different network speeds. To keep you informed, we’re releasing a new feature called performance alerts in beta! These new performance alerts will send you an email when your app start time exceeds a given threshold so you can investigate and fix the latency issue as soon as it appears. Performance alerts can be configured from the console and we’ll be adding more alerts for other performance metrics soon.
Performance Monitoring’s new real-time alerts will let you know if your app start time slows down
Firebase Crashlytics gives you a complete view into your app’s stability so you can track, prioritize, and resolve bugs before they impact a large number of users. On top of Crashlytics' enhanced support for Apple platforms and game reporting, Crashlytics now reports Application Not Responding (ANRs) errors! According to our research, ANRs account for almost 50% of all unintended application exits on Android, meaning they can be more detrimental to your app’s quality than crashes. To give you a comprehensive view of your app’s stability issues, Crashlytics now reports ANRs and surfaces contextual information about impacted threads so you can pinpoint the cause of the ANR.
Crashlytics now reports Application Not Responding errors, giving you a more comprehensive view of app stability
We’re also unveiling a new concept in Crashlytics called signals. Signals analyze your crashes to uncover interesting commonalities and characteristics that are helpful for troubleshooting. Today, we’re launching with three signals: early crashes, fresh issues, and repetitive issues. Early crashes refer to crashes that users experience near app start. Fresh issues are new issues in the last 7 days, while repetitive issues are issues that users have been encountering over and over again. Signals are available to both Apple and Android app developers. Check them out during your next app release!
Crashlytics signals surface interesting commonalities and characteristics of crashes to improve troubleshooting
As your app grows, Firebase offers the control, automation, and flexibility you need to drive the business outcomes you want, such as increasing engagement and revenue.
Firebase Cloud Messaging makes it easy to send targeted, automated, and customized push notifications across platforms so you can reach users even when they aren’t actively using your app. Firebase In-App Messaging gives you the ability to send contextual messages to users who are actively using your app so you can encourage them to complete key in-app actions. These two products go hand-in-hand in keeping users engaged. That’s why we’re thrilled to reveal a redesigned console experience that brings them together. This unified dashboard gives you a holistic view into all of your messaging campaigns, so you can run sophisticated, multi-touch campaigns for different audiences and see how they perform – from one place. For example, you can send a coupon code to users who are predicted to churn to keep them around because both Cloud Messaging and In-App Messaging work seamlessly with Google Analytics’ new Predictive Audiences. To try the new unified dashboard, visit the console and click the “Preview now” button.
The unified dashboard for Cloud Messaging and In-App Messaging lets you view and manage your campaigns from one place
Another way to retain and delight users is by personalizing the app experience to suit their needs and preferences. With Firebase Remote Config, you can dynamically control and change the way your app looks and behaves without releasing a new version. Today, we’re excited to launch a new Remote Config feature called personalization into beta! Personalization gives you the ability to automatically optimize individual user experiences to maximize the objectives you care about through the power of machine learning. After a simple setup, personalization will continuously find and apply the right app configuration for each user to produce the best outcome, taking the load off of you.
Halfbrick, the game studio behind titles like Jetpack Joyride, Dan the Man, and the instant-classic Fruit Ninja, has already used personalization to increase revenue by 16% and boost positive app store ratings by 15%! Ahoy Games, another early customer, tried personalization in a number of their games and successfully grew in-app purchases by 12-13% with little to no effort from their team.
Remote Config personalization uses machine learning to help you optimize user experiences to achieve your goals
We’ve also made several core improvements to Remote Config, including updating the parameter edit flow to make it easier to change targeting conditions and default values, and adding data type support to strengthen data validation and reduce the risk of pushing a bad value to your users. Finally, we’ve revamped the change history so you can clearly see when and how parameters were last changed. This will help you understand which app configuration changes correlate to changes in key metrics. Go to the Remote Config console to check out these updates and try personalization today!
Targeting and data validation improvements in Remote Config
From building your app to optimizing it, we are your partner throughout the entire journey. We aim to make app development faster, easier, and streamline your path to success.You can rely on us to help you make your app the best it can be for users and your business. To get more insight into the announcements we shared above, be sure to check out the technical sessions, codelabs, and demos from Firebase Summit! If you want a sneak peek at what we’ll be launching in 2022, join our Alpha program!
Getting feedback on your app's releases before they reach the store is critical. App Distribution makes it easy to share pre-release builds of your Android and iOS apps with your testers. You can distribute your apps to testers using the Firebase console, the Firebase CLI, or the App Distribution plugins for Gradle and fastlane.
We've also heard that you'd like to integrate your own tools directly with App Distribution, or implement custom pre-release testing workflows. That's where the Firebase App Distribution REST API comes in. With this API, you can build custom logic into your team's tools and services to add and remove testers, upload new app binaries, distribute your releases, update release notes, deleting releases, and more.
For example, let's say that your company gives all employees early access to the latest builds of your app. You also have a personnel management tool that automates the employee onboarding and offboarding process. Wouldn't it be nice if employee access was automatically granted and revoked as employees join and leave your company? With the REST API, you can build this functionality directly into your company's workflow.
Let's walk through the process to automatically grant and revoke access.
To access the API, enable the Firebase App Distribution API for your project and choose a way to authenticate your integration. In this scenario, download a service account key and use oath2l to get an access token:
oauth2l fetch \ --credentials /path/to/service-account.json \ --scope https://www.googleapis.com/auth/cloud-platform
Next, in hooks that are triggered when an employee joins or leaves the company, use the testers.batchAdd and testers.batchRemove endpoints to add or remove the employee as a tester in App Distribution using an HTTP request to the API. For example, here's how you can add a new tester using curl:
SERVICE=https://firebaseappdistribution.googleapis.com curl --request POST \ $SERVICE/v1/projects/[PROJECT_NUMBER]/testers:batchAdd \ --header 'Authorization: Bearer [ACCESS_TOKEN]' \ --header 'Accept: application/json' \ --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \ --data '{"emails":["newemployee@company.com"]}'
Let's say you periodically audit access to your pre-release apps to make sure that only authorized internal testers have access. To automate this audit, you can use the testers.list endpoint to get the list of testers in your Firebase project. You can then write your own logic to compare that to your list of employee email addresses, or check the domains:
curl \ $SERVICE/v1/projects/[PROJECT_NUMBER]/testers \ --header 'Authorization: Bearer [ACCESS_TOKEN]' \ --header 'Accept: application/json'
Tester access and auditing is just one example of custom functionality you can build using the API. Other examples of functionality that you can build include keeping release notes in sync with your bug tracking system, fetching details about your most recent release, adding testers to releases from third-party tools, deleting releases in bulk, or fetching test certificate info for your Android app bundle releases.
App Distribution helps you gain confidence in your releases, and the REST API empowers you to integrate pre-release testing into your existing workflows. So get started with the API today! To learn more, and to try out the API using the embedded API Explorer, see the Firebase App Distribution API documentation.
Try out the API using the API Explorer in the documentation.
If you’ve visited the Firebase console’s Analytics section recently, you might have noticed something new… an updated Analytics dashboard, a new Realtime view and a few other UI enhancements.
These new changes are part of our effort to improve the Google Analytics experience in Firebase, by providing access to some of the newest Google Analytics 4 innovations directly in the Firebase console.
Firebase now shows a curated collection of Analytics cards that provide the same information as the previous dashboard, but presented more intuitively to get to key insights faster. This matches the ‘App Developer - Firebase’ collection in Google Analytics 4 - meaning you no longer need to switch to the Google Analytics interface to see this data. The cards are now organized by surfacing overview metrics first, followed by user engagement and retention cards, then monetization and user demographics.
The dashboard now also contains a lot of explorer cards that allow you to more easily drill-down into specifics for data represented by that card for more details - like the new App Versions card which provides a quick view into the number of users you have per app version, and a jumpoff link to see more data like engagement rates, revenue and conversions per app version as well.
The Publisher card is another example of providing a more natural flow to learn more about how different ad units are performing as well as the revenue they are generating.
Before adding this card to the dashboard, accessing this information would require digging into specific event reports, like the ad_impression event report to get out the ad unit performance or revenue data. Well, no need to go digging through various event reports anymore with this updated flow that should make accessing this information more convenient and intuitive.
Check out this Google Analytics help center article for more information about the differences between the new and older dashboard cards in the “Data cards before and after” section.
One feature that’s been around in Google Analytics 4 for a while but only just making an appearance in the Firebase console is the Comparisons tool, which replaces what was previously ‘Filters’. Similar to the Filters tool, with the Comparisons tool you can create comparison groups based on any custom or pre-defined Analytics dimensions or audiences. The advantage of the Comparisons tool is that you can create up to five comparison groups at once, and view and compare the Analytics data for each of these groups across all cards on the Analytics dashboard. For example, if you recently ran a promotional campaign offering 10% off in-app purchases to your top purchasers using Remote Config, you can check to see the impact of that at a glance on metrics like user engagement and app revenue by comparing the top purchasers audience, your most engaged users audience, and all users by applying Comparisons in the dashboard.
Note to compare events or conversions as you would have done using Filters in the past, you can navigate to the Events or Conversions card from the dashboard to reveal a detailed report that you can then apply comparisons on.
Check out this article or this video that covers how to use the Comparison tool in more detail.
The Realtime dashboard now shows the same views as in Google Analytics 4 and is great for, well, seeing events come in real-time from around the world. This can be really useful after just releasing a new feature, and seeing new events come in for the first time as it rolls out to your users. The updated dashboard contains new cards and new card capabilities, like the User Acquisition card that can be filtered by source, campaign, medium and platform, as well as the Users card that can now be filtered by audience.
One of the biggest benefits of this new change is the ability to use the Comparisons tool in the Realtime dashboard, too, so you can create and compare different groups over real-time app analytics data.
As part of this change, the Google Analytics settings page now links out to the Google Analytics console where you can modify any Analytics settings as you would previously in the Firebase > Project Settings > Integration > Google Analytics page. The Analytics Linking card however is still available and can be edited from within the Firebase console.
We invite you to take the updated Analytics dashboard in the Firebase console for a spin, and as always, let us know if you have any feedback or questions.
