Firebase App Distribution makes it easy to distribute pre-release versions of your app to trusted testers so you can get valuable feedback before launch. App Distribution lets you manage all of your pre-release builds for both iOS and Android in a central hub, and it gives you the flexibility to distribute these builds right from the console or using the command-line tools that are already part of your workflow - like Gradle, Firebase CLI, and fastlane!
And now, we’re excited to share an update we made to App Distribution: Support for Android App Bundles (AAB)!
Android App Bundles are Android’s new official publishing format that offers a more efficient way to build and release your app, resulting in smaller app download, which improves install success and reduces uninstalls.
App Distribution integrates with Google Play’s internal app sharing service to process the AABs you upload and serve APKs that are optimized for your testers' device configurations. When you distribute AABs, you can:
Since we launched this feature in preview mode, several customers have been using App Distribution to release AABs to test their apps. Here’s what Priceline had to say:
To get started:
You can distribute your AAB via:
Support for AAB is now available for all App Distribution customers! To get started with AAB releases visit the App Distribution console. To learn more about this feature visit the App Distribution docs.
After taking a hiatus in 2020, Google I/O is back and we’re excited to take part in this revamped, digital event to share the updates we’ve made to Firebase. Over the past year, apps helped us adapt and thrive in our new circumstances, and apps will no doubt continue to play an important role for many years to come. Our mission is to empower developers like you to succeed by providing the resources and technology you need to unblock innovation in ways big and small, so you can focus on building and scaling the apps that people rely on.
We’re happy to share that now, over 3 million apps actively use Firebase every month, including large global businesses and fast-growing startups. Your trust in us is what motivates us to make Firebase even better. Today at Google I/O 2021, we’re unveiling updates to our platform that will help you accelerate app development, run your app more effectively, and optimize your user experience so you can grow your business. Read on for more, and don’t forget to check out the What’s New in Firebase session.
Hop to a particular section if you’re short on time, or read the entire blog.
Accelerate app development with new building blocks
Gain actionable insights to run your app efficiently
Optimize your user experience to scale with ease
We’re continuing to invest in tools that save you time so you can focus on the things you love and deliver value to your users, faster.
The Storage Emulator joins the Emulator Suite for broader backend coverage
The Emulator Suite lets you run emulated versions of our backend products on your own machine, enabling rapid iteration without interfering with production data or incurring costs. A few months ago, we added support for Firebase Authentication and now, we’re pleased to announce that Cloud Storage for Firebase is also joining the Emulator Suite, giving you broader coverage of our backend products. With the Storage Emulator, you can upload, download, and modify files as you would in production. It also interacts seamlessly with the other emulators, so you can trigger Cloud Functions for Firebase and protect access to your files with Firebase Authentication, all while developing and testing locally on your desktop machine. To use the Emulator Suite, download the Firebase CLI and launch the emulators on your machine or check out our documentation.
The Emulator Suite now includes Firebase Storage
Firebase App Distribution now supports Android App Bundles for streamlined testing
Firebase App Distribution makes it easy to distribute pre-release versions of your app to trusted testers so you can get valuable feedback before launch. App Distribution lets you manage all of your pre-release builds for both iOS and Android in a central hub, and it gives you the flexibility to distribute these builds right from the console or using the command-line tools that are already part of your workflow - like Gradle, Firebase CLI, and fastlane. Today, we’re adding support for Android App Bundles! Now, you can test the actual binaries that Android users install on their devices. App Bundles are the future of publishing on Google Play; by launching this feature, our goal is to make the transition as simple and smooth as possible for you. To learn more about Android App Bundle releases with App Distribution, check out the docs.
You can now distribute AAB releases with Firebase App Distribution
Strengthening app security with App Check
Keeping your infrastructure and users safe is an important priority for us. That’s why we’re excited to announce that App Check, a powerful new security feature, is now available in beta. App Check is an additional layer of security that protects access to your services by verifying that incoming traffic is coming from your app, and blocking traffic that doesn't have valid credentials. Right now, App Check is available for Cloud Storage, Realtime Database, and Cloud Functions for Firebase, and we’ll be expanding it to other products soon! Register your app with App Check and start enforcing protections through the Firebase console. To learn more about App Check, check out our documentation.
Start protecting your app and user data with App Check
New modularized Web SDKs improve load times
In addition to adding a new layer of security, we have just released new versions of all of the Firebase web SDKs to beta. These new SDKs allow you to import only what you need, reducing SDK size up to 80%, which can lead to less code and faster page loads. Download the new modularized SDKs today!
More Extensions for adding features and functionality
Firebase Extensions are pre-packaged bundles of code that automate common development tasks and let you add new functionality to your app in fewer steps. Now, we’re partnering with companies you know and trust so you can do even more. A few months ago, we worked with Stripe to launch the Run Subscription Payments with Stripe and the Send Invoices using Stripe extensions.
We’re pleased to announce new Extensions that help you implement search on Firestore with Algolia, send personalized emails to your customers with MailChimp, communicate with your users with MessageBird, and analyze user generated content with the Perspective API from Jigsaw, all without having to write any code or learn new APIs on your own. For more details, go to the Firebase Extensions page and install them today!
Our newest Extensions, built in partnership with other development teams, make it easy to integrate your app with the tools and services you love
Firebase products uncover actionable insights about your app, which you can use to deliver high-quality experiences to your users
Enhanced search, filtering, and games reporting in Crashlytics
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. Many of you have instrumented Crashlytics custom keys as a way to gain more context about your app’s crashes. Now, you can find trends across these custom keys and filter down sessions to understand and fix your app’s trickiest crashes with Crashlytics’ new custom keys search and filtering capabilities.
You can now search and filter through custom keys in Crashlytics
Today, we’re also launching major improvements to Crashlytics to better meet the needs of game developers building natively or via popular game engines such as Unity and Cocos2d. These improvements include increased visibility into a crash’s root cause through more reliable and detailed NDK stack traces, superior grouping of Unity crashes, and by surfacing enhanced device metadata for Unity apps like GPU, DPI, Resolution, and more. This will help you ensure your players get a fun gaming experience that doesn’t abruptly crash.
Unveiling realtime data for Performance Monitoring and a revamped dashboard
High performance is key to user retention and engagement. 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. Today, we’re excited to announce that Performance Monitoring now processes data in real time! This means you can closely watch your app’s performance during a release or while you’re launching a new feature, and then take action right away if issues arise.
Firebase Performance Monitoring now process data in realtime
A few months ago, we introduced you to the redesigned, customizable Performance Monitoring dashboard that allows you to bring the metrics you care about most to the forefront. Now, we’ve added a new traces table to this dashboard. The traces table helps you sort, search, and pinpoint the biggest performance changes that need your immediate attention - even if the changes occur in metrics you don’t monitor every day. The fully revamped Performance Monitoring dashboard with realtime data gives you a full picture of your app’s performance in one place. To get the new traces table with realtime data, simply update to the latest Performance Monitoring SDK.
The redesigned Performance Monitoring dashboard brings the metrics you care about most to the forefront
We’ve been working hard to strengthen Firebase Remote Config so as your app and business grow, you can tailor Firebase to suit your sophisticated needs.
Remote Config updates help you better visualize and optimize your app configuration
Firebase Remote Config lets you dynamically control and change your app so you can set up feature flags, run experiments to test ideas, and deliver personalized experiences, all without releasing a new version of your app. Over the past few months, we’ve made several improvements to help you better visualize your configuration and easily optimize your app to drive the outcomes you want - whether that’s increasing subscriptions like Tapple or Mobills, or boosting ad revenue like Pomelo Games.
First, we’ve redesigned the Remote Config console to highlight vital information and give you more flexibility. For example, we’ve increased the length of parameter descriptions, which means you have more space to describe what a parameter does, what values it can take, and whether or not it is safe to change. You can also expand or collapse parameters to see all of its conditional values in one view.
Second, we’ve updated the publish flow to make it crystal clear which of your changes are pending, and remind you to publish changes in your newly edited configuration.
Third, we’ve completely overhauled the Remote Config A/B test results page to remove unnecessary information and better organize the remaining data so you can act on your experiment results with confidence.
The updated A/B test results page makes it easier to understand how your experiments are performing
Last but not least, we’re putting the finishing touches on a new feature of Remote Config, called personalization. Personalization will give you the ability to automatically optimize individual user experiences to maximize the objectives you care about - such as revenue or engagement - 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. If you want an early look at this feature and to try it out for yourself, join our Alpha program.
With these improvements to Firebase, we aim to make app development faster, easier, and streamline your path to business success. People are relying on your apps to thrive in our new world, and you can rely on us to help you build, run, and scale your apps. Over the next few days, be sure to check out sessions, workshops, and more we have lined up for Google I/O 2021, and stay tuned for the rest of the year because we’ll have plenty more exciting announcements in the second half of 2021!
It’s hard to believe it’s already been a year since we launched App Distribution to help you with your internal testing on Android and iOS! Based on all your valuable feedback, we’re excited to share a few updates we made to App Distribution since launch.
Most customers automate their releases with App Distribution to quickly send their latest feature branch builds to their QA teams or release candidate builds to their company. This typically means distributing daily or even multiple times per day, which quickly becomes a long list of releases!
To help make this list more manageable, we added release search in the Firebase App Distribution console and tester apps. Now, it’s easy to search by version or release notes to find, manage, and test the exact release you’re looking to get feedback on.
In-app build alerts notify iOS testers when new builds are available to them, making it easier for testers to install the update right from your test app. In-app build alerts are powered through our lightweight open sourced SDK, which you can quickly integrate into your test app.
To increase download speeds for testers around the world using different devices and network connections, we made improvements to our backend systems that handle uploads and downloads. Now testers have a more reliable experience, with some testers experiencing up to 10 times faster downloads.
We recently released version 2.0 of our fastlane plugin, a major rewrite that stripped away the Firebase CLI as a dependency and makes it easier for you to set up your CI. Now, using App Distribution with fastlane is as easy as running `fastlane add_plugin firebase_app_distribution` to get up and running.
`fastlane add_plugin firebase_app_distribution`
All these improvements made to App Distribution wouldn’t be possible without the active Firebase community. With your help, we’ve been able to add more features to our fastlane plugin and it’s possible to use App Distribution in even more ways. Special shout outs to @gunes_dev, who wrote and maintains our Bitrise Step and @ziebawojtek for all of their contributions and support of the App Distribution GitHub Action.
Your feedback has helped shaped our product and our team loves hearing from developers in the #app-distributions Firebase Community Slack channel - come say hi!
There's a lot more in the works with some exciting features launching soon; you can sign up for our Alpha Program to be eligible to try them out. For developers looking to get started with App Distribution, check out our docs.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
