Firebase Dynamic Links are deep links that drive user growth and engagement by allowing you to send users to specific places in your app - across iOS, Android, and the web. Dynamic Links retain their context and attribution data, even if a user needs to install your app first, ensuring new users see the content they're looking for right away. While Dynamic Links can be useful in a number of situations, we heard from many of you that you wanted more ways to customize the actual URL that made up a Dynamic Link.
In the past, Dynamic Links contained a randomly generated subdomain that could not be customized. So when you created a new link, it would look something like https://a7cd8.app.goo.gl/B7vVu.
https://a7cd8.app.goo.gl/B7vVu
Today, we're excited to introduce three ways you can customize your dynamic links: a brand agnostic domain, custom subdomains, and custom paths. Moving forward, you can update your links from something that looks like https://a7cd8.app.goo.gl/B7vVu to a much more friendly https://mygame.page.link/mycampaign.
https://mygame.page.link/mycampaign
We're rolling out these changes after talking with many of you and running tests on how we could improve Dynamic Links. Through your feedback and our experimentation, we discovered three important things:
https://a7cd8.page.link/B7vVu
https://mygame.app.goo.gl/B7vVu
https://a7cd8.app.goo.gl/B7vVu.
https://a7cd8.app.goo.gl/mycampaign
With these results in mind, we are giving you the flexibility to use a brand agnostic root (page.link), create up to five custom subdomains per project, and create a custom path for each new short link. Now, you can have links that look like: mygame.page.link/joinme, mygame.page.link/holidays and mygame-lite.page.link/holidays.
page.link
mygame.page.link/joinme
mygame.page.link/holidays
mygame-lite.page.link/holidays
When you customize your dynamic links in these three ways, your brand will shine through, you will increase trust and conversion, and you'll be able to design links to better fit the context of where they are used.
Creating custom Dynamic Links is easy. There is a one-time setup process in the Firebase Console to set up your domain. Once that's done, you can create new links programmatically or via the console on your chosen domain.
If you're new to Dynamic Links, you'll be prompted to enter a custom subdomain during the setup process. For trademarked subdomains, we also have a verification flow to ensure that the subdomain is reserved for the developer that owns the brand.
For developers with existing Dynamic Links, you may continue to use links on app.goo.gl or create new links on page.link.
app.goo.gl
You'll be able to view the links and associated analytics per domain by selecting the domain from a drop-down selector.
For more information on creating Dynamic Links programmatically, see our documentation on iOS, Android and the REST API.
Thank you to everybody who has been using Dynamic Links and providing us with valuable feedback. We hope that these changes will result in more user engagement and more clicks on your dynamic links for your app.
If you have any questions, feedback or bugs to report please reach us at firebase.google.com/support.
Learn more about Firebase Dynamic Links at https://firebase.google.com/products/dynamic-links/.
Our goal with Firebase is to help developers build better apps and grow them into successful businesses. Six months ago at Google I/O, we took our well-loved backend-as-a-service (BaaS) and expanded it to 15 features to make it Google’s unified app development platform, available across iOS, Android, and the web.
We launched many new features at Google I/O, but our work didn’t stop there. Since then, we’ve learned a lot from you (750,000+ projects created on Firebase to date!) about how you’re using our platform and how we can improve it. Thanks to your feedback, today we’re launching a number of enhancements to Crash Reporting, Analytics, support for game developers and more. For more information on our announcements, tune in to the livestream video from Firebase Dev Summit in Berlin. They’re also listed here:
Often the hardest part about fixing an issue is reproducing it, so we’ve added rich context to each crash to make the process simple. Firebase Crash Reporting now shows Firebase Analytics event data in the logs for each crash. This gives you clarity into the state of your app leading up to an error. Things like which screens of your app were visited are automatically logged with no instrumentation code required. Crash logs will also display any custom events and parameters you explicitly log using Firebase Analytics. Firebase Crash Reporting works for both iOS and Android apps.
Glide, a popular live video messaging app, relies on Firebase Crash Reporting to ensure user quality and release agility. “No matter how much effort you put into testing, it will never be as thorough as millions of active users in different locations, experiencing a variety of network conditions and real life situations. Firebase allows us to rapidly gain trust in our new version during phased release, as well as accelerate the process of identifying core issues and providing quick solutions.” - Roi Ginat, Founder, Glide.
We want to help you deliver high-quality experiences, so testing your app before it goes into the wild is incredibly important. Firebase Test Lab allows you to easily test your app on many physical and virtual devices in the cloud, without writing a single line of test code. Beginning today, developers on the Spark service tier (which is free!) can run five tests per day on physical devices and ten tests per day on virtual devices—with no credit card setup required. We’ve also heard that you want more device options, so we’ve added 11 new popular Android device models to Test Lab, available today.
We know that your data is most actionable when you can see and process it as quickly as possible. Therefore, we’re announcing a number of features to help you maximize the potential of your analytics events:
We were happy to give you a sneak preview at the Firebase Dev Summit of a new feature we are now building, StreamView, which will offer a live, dynamic view of your analytics data as it streams in.
To further enhance your targeting options, we’ve improved the connection between Firebase Analytics and other Firebase features, such as Dynamic Links and Remote Config. For example, you can now use Dynamic Links on your Facebook business page, and we can identify Facebook as a source in Firebase Analytics reporting. Also, you can now target Remote Config changes by User Properties, in addition to Audiences.
Game developers are building great apps, and we want Firebase to work for you, too. We’ve built an entirely new plugin for Unity that supports Analytics, the Realtime Database, Authentication, Dynamic Links, Remote Config, Notifications and more. We've also expanded our C++ SDK with Realtime Database support.
FirebaseUI is a library that provides common UI elements when building apps, and it’s a quick way to integrate with Firebase. FirebaseUI 1.0 includes a drop-in UI flow for Firebase Authentication, with common identity providers such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter. FirebaseUI 1.0 also added features such as client-side joins and intersections for the Realtime Database, plus integrations with Glide and SDWebImage that make downloading and displaying images from Firebase Storage a cinch. Follow our progress or contribute to our Android, iOS, and Web components on Github.
We want to provide the best tool for developers, but it’s also important that we give resources and training to help you get more out of the platform. As such, we’ve created a new Udacity course: Firebase in a Weekend! It’s an instructor-led video course to help all developers get up and running with Firebase on iOS and Android, in two days.
Finally, to help wrap your head around all our announcements, we’ve created a new demo app. This is an easy way to see how Analytics, Crash Reporting, Test Lab, Notifications, and Remote Config work in a live environment, without having to write a line of code.
Helping developers build better apps and successful businesses is at the core of Firebase. We work hard on it every day. We love hearing your feedback and ideas for new features and improvements—and we hope you can see from the length of this post that we take them to heart! Follow us on Twitter, join our Slack channel, participate in our Google Group, and let us know what you think. We’re excited to see what you’ll build next!
We know that it's important for you to make sure your apps can run on the latest and greatest technology out there. And in the world of iOS development, there's this little release on the horizon called iOS 10 that many of you are excited about supporting with your apps.
Well, we here on the Firebase team also want to make sure your apps are up and running on iOS 10 as soon as it's made available to the general public. So we're going to go over some of the changes that we've included in the latest version (3.5.1) of the Firebase Cocoapod, and let you know about upcoming changes that will affect you as we move into the exciting new world of iOS 10 development.
Dynamic Links, Invites, App Indexing
With the latest version of the Firebase library, we've added support for handling deep links on iOS 10. If your app uses a feature that relies on deep links -- specifically, Dynamic Links, Firebase Invites, and App Indexing -- go ahead and update to the latest version of the library. Rebuild your app (no code changes needed!), and these features should all work properly.
Firebase Analytics
The latest version of the Firebase SDK includes some changes to more accurately track app installs resulting from AdWords search and display ads. If this sounds familiar, it’s because this feature was also included in version 3.3.0 of Firebase, but now we've added support for this on iOS 10 as well. Like the new deep link support, this should work automatically if you rebuild your code with the new library.
Firebase Cloud Messaging
iOS 10 made a lot of exciting changes around notifications, along with new ways for you as a developer to handle incoming user notifications. Specifically, notifications are now handled by methods belonging to the UNUserNotificationCenterDelegate protocol, while the old UIApplicationDelegate methods like application:didReceiveRemoteNotification are now deprecated.
UNUserNotificationCenterDelegate
UIApplicationDelegate
application:didReceiveRemoteNotification
That said, you might notice that the most recent release of the Firebase SDK is still calling the older appDelegate methods. We hope to have support for these new UNUserNotificationCenterDelegate protocol methods soon, so do keep an eye out for any future announcements as we update our libraries.
A Quick Note About Firebase Auth and Xcode 8
We've noticed what seems to be an issue with the latest iOS 10 simulators (up to beta 6 at the time of this writing) that causes Firebase Auth to throw an error due it to not being able to write values to the keychain. This issue does not affect real devices.
We have filed a radar with Apple and are hoping to get this issue resolved shortly, but you may encounter errors when testing Firebase Auth in the simulator. As a workaround, we recommend testing Auth on a physical device running iOS 10. If you do not have access to a real device, you also can try enabling Keychain Sharing in the Capabilities section of your app, as described in this StackOverflow post.
What about Swift 3?
You might have noticed that the code samples in our documentation still reflect Swift 2.3. With all the changes that are still happening in Swift 3, we've decided to wait until version 3.0 has been officially released before switching over the code samples in our documentation.
Of course, if you're interested in trying out our samples in Swift 3, you can always download our latest sample code and let Xcode's Swift conversion tool convert the samples for you. It does a remarkably good job. And, in the next few days, we'll be creating a specific Swift 3 branch of our sample apps, so you can check out those branches from GitHub and see the source code without having to go through the conversion process.
Send us Feedback!
Obviously, releasing a library to support an operating system that's still in beta is a tricky proposition. Issues may still arise here and there as new versions of iOS 10 are made available, and if they do, we'll try to address them as quickly as we can. So if you encounter an error that seems to be specific to iOS 10, please let us know! Our Google Group is a good place to start.
We're all familiar with the idea of URLs that take you to a specific place on a website. And with the push towards mobile computing, it's becoming a lot more common to see URLs that can take you to a specific place within a specific mobile app. A concept most of us know as deep linking.
The idea of deep linking into your app is compelling, and it's easy to understand why. With just one URL, you can not only send users right into your app, but also to a precise location inside your app. Imagine if your email campaign promoting the hot new feature of your app could take users directly to that new feature with a single click. Or if the "Try our app" button on your website could not only take users to your app, but bring them directly to whatever content on your site inspired them to install your app in the first place.
Unfortunately, deep linking into an app isn't perfect. It's difficult to get the same link to point to both your iOS and Android app. And they might behave differently -- or simply break -- if your user doesn't have your app installed. Most importantly, if your target user has to install your app from the app store first, the context of that original link is often lost, and your users are left with your generic home screen rather than a customized warm welcome.
That's why we've created Firebase Dynamic Links: they're deep links that work the way you want them to. With one single link, you can send users either to your iOS or Android app, if they have it installed. And if they don't, you can send then to the appropriate listing in the App Store or on Google Play. Most importantly, these links survive the installation process, so when a user starts up their app for the first time, you can still retrieve the deep link URL that brought them to your app in the first place.
As a fun summer promotion, Shazam recently partnered with Coca Cola to allow users to share some of their favorite tunes with their friends through the fine art of lip-sync videos.
Friends who received these videos got to view them inside a web page. Before implementing Firebase Dynamic Links, these web pages contained two separate links: "Install the app" and "Make your own video", and it was up to the user to know which link to click on. But after implementing Firebase Dynamic Links, Shazam was able to replace these two links with a single "Make your own video with Shazam" link that either took future lip-sync stars directly into the app, or the appropriate app store for their platform.
Thanks to their use of Dynamic Links, users who installed the app got to directly jump to the part of the app they cared about, and Shazam discovered that users who installed their app through this kind of onboarding flow had a 15% higher retention after 2 weeks than users who started up their app normally.
Firebase Dynamic Links can be created on the fly, so your app or website can generate a new link whenever you'd like. You can also use the Firebase console to create Dynamic Links with our online form, in case you have non-technical members of your team who want to create their own links and don't feel like spending their time hand-escaping URLs.
Because Firebase Dynamic Links are part of the Firebase platform, they work alongside other features like Firebase Analytics. Not only can we give you basic information like the number of people who clicked on a link, but the Firebase platform will automatically track utm_ parameters (these are parameters your marketing team typically adds to any external campaign) so that you can analyze any of your important in-app events by the campaign or medium that brought them there in the first place.
Firebase Dynamic Links are free to use, and you can get started today -- no matter how much or how little of the Firebase platform you end up using. Need some ideas to get you started? Here's a few suggestions:
And of course, Dynamic Links are a great fit with your latest Email, SMS, or social media campaigns.
To find out more about Firebase Dynamic Links, you can check out our documentation here, and hop on into the Firebase console to get started.
Eighteen months ago, Firebase joined Google. Since then, our backend-as-a-service (BaaS) that handles the heavy lifting of building an app has grown from a passionate community of 110,000 developers to over 450,000.
Our current features -- Realtime Database, User Authentication, and Hosting -- make app development easier, but there’s more we can do, so today, we’re announcing a major expansion!
Firebase is expanding to become a unified app platform for Android, iOS and mobile web development. We’re adding new tools to help you develop faster, improve app quality, acquire and engage users, and monetize apps. On top of this, we’re launching a brand new analytics product that ties everything together, all while staying true to the guiding principles we’ve had from the beginning:
Firebase Analytics is our brand new, free and unlimited analytics solution for mobile apps. It benefits from Google’s experience with Google Analytics, and features some new capabilities for apps:
Firebase Analytics is user and event-centric and gives you insight into what your users are doing in your app. You can also see how your paid advertising campaigns are performing with cross-network attribution, which tells you where your users are coming from. You can see all of this from a single dashboard.
Firebase Analytics is also integrated with other Firebase offerings to provide a single source of truth for in-app activity and through a feature called Audiences. Audiences let you define groups of users with common attributes. Once defined, these groups can be accessed from other Firebase features -- to illustrate, we’ll reference Audiences throughout this post.
To help you build better apps, our suite of backend services is expanding.
Google Cloud Messaging, the most popular cloud-to-device push messaging service in the world, is integrating with Firebase and changing its name to Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM). Available for free and for unlimited usage, FCM supports messaging on iOS, Android, and the Web, and is heavily optimized for reliability and battery-efficiency. It’s built for scale and already sends 170 billion messages per day to two billion devices.
One of our most requested features is the ability to store images, videos, and other large files. We’re launching Firebase Storage so developers can easily and securely upload and download such files. Firebase Storage is powered by Google Cloud Storage, giving it massive scalability and allowing stored files to be easily accessed by Google Cloud projects. The Firebase Storage client SDKs have advanced logic to gracefully handle poor network conditions.
Firebase Remote Config gives you instantly-updatable variables that you can use to tune and customize your app on the fly to deliver the best experience to your users. You can enable or disable features or change the look and feel without having to publish a new version. You can also target configurations to specific Firebase Analytics Audiences so that each of your users has an experience that’s tailored for them.
In addition, we’re continuing to invest heavily in our existing backend products, Firebase Realtime Database, Firebase Hosting, and Firebase Authentication. Authentication has seen the biggest updates, with brand new SDKs, and an upgraded backend infrastructure. This provides added security, reliability, and scale using the same technologies that power Google’s own accounts. We’ve also added new Authentication features including email verification and account linking. For Hosting, custom domain support is now free for all developers, and the Database has a completely rebuilt UI. We’re working hard on other great Realtime Database features, stay tuned for those.
We’re adding two new offerings to Firebase to help you deliver higher quality apps.
When your app crashes, it’s bad for your users and it hurts your business. Firebase Crash Reporting gives you prioritized, actionable reports to help you diagnose and fix problems in your iOS or Android app after it has shipped. We’ve also connected Crash Reporting to Audiences in Firebase Analytics, so you can tell if users on a particular device, in a specific geography, or in any other custom segment are experiencing elevated crash rates.
Cloud Test Lab, announced last year at Google I/O, is now Firebase Test Lab for Android. Test Lab helps you find problems in your app before your users do. It allows for both automatic and customized testing of your app on real devices hosted in Google data centers.
After you’ve launched your app, we can help you grow and re-engage users with five powerful growth features.
Firebase Notifications is a new UI built on top of the Firebase Cloud Messaging APIs that lets you easily deliver notifications to your users without writing a line of code. Using the Notifications console you can re-engage users, run marketing campaigns, and target messages to Audiences in Firebase Analytics.
Firebase Dynamic Links make URLs more powerful in two ways. First, they provide “durability” -- links persist across the app install process so users are taken to the right place when they first open your app. This “warm welcome” increases engagement and retention. Second, they allow for dynamically changing the destination of a link based on run-time conditions, such as the type of browser or device. Use them in web, email, social media, and physical promotions to gain insight into your growth channels.
Firebase Invites turns your customers into advocates. Your users can easily share referral codes or their favorite content via SMS or email to their network, so you can increase your app's reach and retention.
Firebase App Indexing, formerly Google App Indexing, brings new and existing users to your app from the billions of Google searches. If your app is already installed, users can launch it directly from the search results. New users are presented with a link to install your app.
AdWords, Google’s advertising platform for user acquisition and engagement, is now integrated with Firebase. Firebase can track your AdWords app installs and report lifetime value to the Firebase Analytics dashboard. Firebase Audiences can be used in AdWords to re-engage specific groups of users. In-app events can be defined as conversions in AdWords, to automatically optimize your ads, including universal app campaigns.
To help you generate revenue from your app and build a sustainable business, we’ve integrated Firebase with AdMob, an advertising platform used by more than 1 million apps. We’ve made it easier to get started with AdMob when you integrate the Firebase SDK into your app. Using AdMob, you can choose from the latest ad formats, including native ads, which help provide a great user experience.
Along with new feature launches, we’re moving our website and documentation to a new home: firebase.google.com.
We’re also launching a brand new console to manage your app. It is completely redesigned and rebuilt for improved ease of use, and we’ve deeply integrated it with other Google offerings, like Google Cloud and Google Play.
Firebase now uses the same underlying account system as Google Cloud Platform, which means you can use Cloud products with your Firebase app. For example, a feature of Firebase Analytics is the ability to export your raw analytics data to BigQuery for advanced querying. We’ll continue to weave together Cloud and Firebase, giving you the functionality of a full public cloud as you grow.
You can also link your Firebase account to Google Play from our new console. This allows data, like in-app purchases, to flow to Firebase Analytics, and ANRs (application not responding) to flow to Firebase Crash Reporting, giving you one place to check the status of your app.
Finally, we’re announcing the beta launch of a new C++ SDK. You can find the documentation and getting started guides here.
We’re excited to announce that most of these new products, including Analytics, Crash Reporting, Remote Config, and Dynamic Links, are free for unlimited usage.
For our four paid products: Test Lab, Storage, Realtime Database, and Hosting, we’re announcing simpler pricing. We now offer:
Many things are changing, but Firebase’s core principles remain the same. We care deeply about providing a great developer experience through easy-to-use APIs, intuitive interfaces, comprehensive documentation, and tight integrations. We’re committed to cross-platform development for iOS, Android, and the Web, and when you run into trouble, we’ll provide support to help you succeed.
If you were using a Firebase feature before today -- like the Realtime Database, GCM, or App Indexing -- there’s no impact on your app. We’ll continue to support you, though we recommend upgrading to the latest SDK to access our new features.
As far as we’ve come, this is still early days. We’ll continue to refine and add to Firebase. For example, the JavaScript SDK does not yet support all the new features. We’re working quickly to close gaps, and we’d love to hear your feedback so we can improve. You can help by requesting a feature.
All the new features are ready-to-go, and already in use by apps like Shazam, SkyScanner, PicCollage, and more. Get started today by signing up, visiting our new site, or reading the documentation to learn more.
We can’t wait to hear what you think!
