First impressions matter to app users. Even the most well-designed apps can fall flat if they don’t consistently deliver a crash-free experience.
Picture one of your app users getting ready to unwind after work. They grab a snack, get comfortable on the couch, and open their favorite gaming app … and it crashes. Or perhaps it freezes every time they’re on the brink of reaching the next level. These unstable experiences can frustrate users and may result in them uninstalling or leaving a scathing review on the app store.
In fact, quality issues are the most common reason for early app deletion. One in five users (19%) will uninstall an app due to technical errors or crashes.1
There are a handful of reasons for app crashes. A user’s device may have low memory or a weak chipset, or it may be running an earlier OS version. Alternatively, the app’s code may be filled with bugs. More importantly, as you add new features and acquire more users on different devices, you’re likely to encounter a wider variety of crashes behind the scenes.
Manually tracking, organizing, and fixing crashes can be a complex and time-consuming challenge. And even if you collect every bit of crash data, it can still be unclear what’s causing your app to crash or which errors are impacting the most users. That’s where having the right crash reporting tools makes all the difference.
Continually improving your app and launching new features is one of the best ways to increase retention and engage new and existing users. However, as your user base grows, splitting your time between releasing new features and monitoring the stability of new releases becomes a bit of a conundrum.
Real-time crash reporting in Firebase Crashlytics allows you to quickly triage and troubleshoot any bugs in your app by gathering and grouping crashes based on where they occurred in your app’s code. Groups of crashes are listed in order of frequency and degree of impact on users, making it easier to identify which issues to tackle and providing you with more time to build features that keep users engaged.
Crash report data displayed in the Firebase Crashlytics dashboard
To go even deeper into your crash data, you can enable BigQuery streaming export to identify prevalent issues and understand trends over time — such as which OS versions or specific devices are causing the most crashes. This helps you visualize your crash data and monitor issues that trigger alerts and custom workflows. Enabling BigQuery streaming also gives you the ability to analyze your data with BigQuery SQL, export it to another cloud provider, and use Google Data Studio to create custom dashboards and visualizations of crash trends.
Crashlytics integrated with BigQuery
For an app like Spotify — with more than 65 teams maintaining millions of lines of code per platform and launching new updates every week — moving fast and at scale is essential. To reduce stress on its development team before each launch, Spotify switched from manually tracking crashes every day to automating their release process using Crashlytics, primarily with BigQuery. Rather than having the team’s release manager on call to monitor each crash, Spotify now uses Crashlytics to track crashes for alpha and beta builds, set rules for incoming tickets, and assign tickets to the right teams.
Deliveroo, a food delivery company based in the U.K., similarly adopted Crashlytics and BigQuery to get ahead of crashes before they reach a certain threshold while tracking and analyzing performance data of each new release in real time. With the ability to create customized reports and separate errors, the development team drastically cut down on the time spent troubleshooting and reproducing app issues — and crash-free sessions increased from 99.35% to more than 99.7%.
Crashes don’t just turn away your existing app users — negative app reviews caused by an unstable session can also impact your ability to acquire new users. That’s why it’s crucial to know when and where crashes are happening.
Crashlytics velocity alerts notify you when a particular crash starts spiking so you can respond before the bug impacts more users. Velocity alerts are also configurable, giving you the power to set thresholds that determine when alerts should fire based on the percentage of user sessions being affected.
For instance, velocity alerts can detect major bugs during the rollout of a new release of your app or quickly alert you if there’s an issue impacting a large percentage of users. Velocity alerts will send an email or message on Slack, Jira, or PagerDuty, depending on which third-party integration you have enabled with your project.
Velocity alert settings in the Firebase Console
That’s exactly how Swiggy — one of India’s largest food delivery services — simultaneously monitors every app issue while focusing on the most significant ones first. Swiggy’s development team connected Crashlytics velocity alerts to PagerDuty and Jira to notify its on-call engineer whenever critical crashes reach a certain threshold. This allowed Swiggy to keep shipping fast with the confidence that they will be notified about high-priority crashes and low-priority crashes in the right manner.
Quickly identifying prevalent crashes is just one piece of the puzzle. By getting to the root cause, you can mitigate risk and avoid frustrating your app users by ensuring those crashes don’t happen again.
Crashlytics custom logs and keys record the events a user experienced during their session by tracking the state and sequence of their app. This gives you an actionable snapshot of what the user was doing leading up to the moment your app crashed. You can also define custom keys such as “installation_source”, “network,” and “language” to pinpoint exactly what happened before each crash — like whether a user installed your app on the Play Store or if they were connected to Wi-Fi — and reduce the time it takes to reproduce it.
And by using Crashlytics with Google Analytics, you can automatically capture predefined Google Analytics events — known as breadcrumbs — which enhances the data captured with custom logs and provides more detailed information on what caused a crash.
Breadcrumbs in Google Analytics
For mobile game publishers like Tapps Games, delivering a stable and immersive experience is crucial for keeping gamers engaged. Previously, Tapps would manually search through user reviews for negative feedback and then try to reproduce the crashes that users described. With Crashlytics' velocity alerts, the team was immediately notified when severe crashes were on the rise. After digging into the data, they realized an update to their Vlogger Go Viral game's video creation process and a simultaneous community player event was leading to consistent crashes.
Tapps Games’ development team jumped on a fix that helped boost their Google Play store rating from 3.9 to 4.7 and increased their crash-free users from 94.6% to 99.8%.
To grow your audience, keep users engaged, and spark positive reviews and recommendations, app stability needs to be a key focus area. Installing the Firebase Crashlytics SDK in your app gives you the tools and information you need to stay on top of critical issues.
In the third and final series of our guide, we’ll spotlight a set of tools you can use alongside Firebase Crashlytics to understand how your app is performing from a user's point of view.
Sources
Posted by the Firebase team
Stability and performance are the core of every successful app. Fast, crash-free experiences encourage users to stay engaged and drive positive reviews. That’s why keeping a close eye on your app’s stability is crucial for competing in today’s thriving app marketplace.
Users expect the best experience every time they interact with an app. And if bugs or latency issues get in the way, they’ll be quick to find a better option. Research has shown 88% of app users will abandon apps based on bugs and glitches. And within that group, 51% of users said they’d abandon an app completely if they experienced one or more bugs per day.
Not only is quality important to retaining users, but it’s important for attracting new users as well. If a large percentage of users are frustrated and your app store listing is filled with negative feedback about performance issues, you might have trouble acquiring new users.
In fact, 54% of users who left a 1-star review in the Play Store mentioned app stability and bugs.1
It’s no wonder that stability and performance are top areas of focus for developers. Our own Firebase research shows that a top need for developers is to obtain the tools and services that help them debug technical issues, trace issues back to changes in their code, and detect technical performance issues.
A large portion of the pre-launch development for a new app is spent squashing bugs and testing for potential issues. But getting your app ready for launch is just the first step — once it’s out in the world, maintaining your app’s health becomes an ongoing process as you create new features and iterate on previous versions.
It's important to remember that app quality isn’t one-size-fits-all. Depending on the type of app and how you define success, you’ll want to prioritize the factors that are crucial for your business. With Firebase’s customized reporting tools and real-time insights, you can hone in on the metrics that matter most.
For instance, in a productivity app — where users want a clean, simple interface and the ability to use it on the go — slow response time and high error rates will cause many users to drop off. Conversely, users might tolerate a bit of lag between menu screens in a food delivery app. But if it crashes every time they reach the checkout screen, your in-app revenue is sure to suffer.
No matter what type of app you have, here are a few of the most notable quality metrics that successful apps get right:
Monitoring metrics like these can mean the difference between driving downloads and retaining satisfied users versus seeing churn and negative reviews from dissatisfied users.
To stay ahead in such a dynamic app ecosystem, you need to know precisely where stability and performance issues occur in your app. In the next two blog posts of this series, we’ll spotlight two Firebase products that can help you detect crashes in your app and gather actionable insight about your app’s performance from a user’s perspective.
With Android App Bundles, you can separate your app into a base module and feature modules, allowing certain features of your app to be delivered conditionally or downloaded on demand. Each user of your app will receive only the code they need, when they need it.
As of the 28.0.0 release of the Firebase BoM, you can now use Firebase SDKs in feature modules of your app, not just your base module! This means you can reduce your app size if you're only using Firebase services in some of your modules.
For instance, imagine you have an app which uses Firebase Authentication for login and has an optional "chat with support" feature which uses Firebase Realtime Database. In a monolithic app structure, all of these features would be included in the base app module and delivered at install time:
With the latest version of the Firebase Android SDK, you could use feature modules to separate each feature. The signin feature would still be delivered at install time, since most users need to sign in. However, by moving the "chat with support" module to a feature module configured with on-demand delivery, it would be delivered only when the user needs it:
With this modular structure, your app's initial download size is much smaller. The feature module will defer downloading of not only the Realtime Database SDK, which is about 400kB, but also all the code, strings, resources, and assets needed to build the chat module.
To get started, just add the following dependency to your app's base module:
// base module dependencies { // Note: this library is not yet included in the Firebase BoM implementation 'com.google.firebase:firebase-dynamic-module-support:16.0.0-beta01' }
Then, you can add Firebase dependencies to feature modules and use them as you normally would.
// feature-signin module dependencies { implementation platform('com.google.firebase:firebase-bom:28.0.0') implementation 'com.google.firebase:firebase-auth' } // feature-chat module dependencies { implementation platform('com.google.firebase:firebase-bom:28.0.0') implementation 'com.google.firebase:firebase-database' }
By using a modular architecture, you can reduce the initial download size of your app and progressively enhance it with rich, Firebase-powered features as needed.
To read more about feature modules and how they work with the Firebase Android SDK, check out the documentation:
When we first began working on the Firebase Emulator Suite we dreamed of the day that every backend service in Firebase would have a local emulator. Today we can proudly say we're releasing another great emulator for Firebase Build products: the Cloud Storage for Firebase emulator.
The Cloud Storage for Firebase emulator integrates with the rest of the Firebase Emulator Suite, including the Firebase Auth emulator and the Cloud Functions emulator, unlocking the ability to locally test your app end-to-end like never before.
Just like the other components in the Firebase Emulator Suite, the Cloud Storage for Firebase emulator is part of the Firebase command-line interface which allows you to develop and test your app without connecting to production services.
The Cloud Storage for Firebase emulator supports the Web, Android, iOS and Admin (for Node.js) SDKs so regardless of where your app runs, you can use the new emulator.
The Cloud Storage for Firebase emulator supports all operations from the Web, iOS, and Android SDKs. This includes evaluating security rules, uploading and downloading files, and modifying metadata.
The emulator also supports all the most popular methods in the Firebase Admin SDK. This includes the same operations of uploading and downloading files along with metadata operations. If you're using more advanced Cloud Storage features which aren't supported, let us know. We'll continue to expand functionality over the coming months and your feedback will help us prioritize what to implement.
Make sure you update the Firebase CLI to at least version 9.11.0 and run the following command:
firebase init
Select Cloud Storage and the Emulators, when prompted, pick the Cloud Storage emulator. If this is a first time setup, you'll need to pick each Firebase product you need, such as Cloud Functions, Firestore and Realtime Database rules, as well as Hosting sites. Once everything you need is initialized, run the following command:
firebase emulators:start
This will start the Storage Emulator on localhost:9199 by default. Jump over to our documentation to connect your app to your new emulator!
Now that every Build product in Firebase has a local emulator, you can do the majority of your development entirely locally. We can't wait to see all the new stuff you'll build with your newly unlocked productivity. Make sure to send us a tweet and let us know what you make!
Attendees at this year's virtual Google I/O that visited the Firebase I/O product page or our virtual booth in the Google I/O Adventure experience may have noticed a unicycle-riding robot with an antenna looking very excited to play a drawing game with everyone!
Firebase's mission is to help app developers succeed by offering products and services that developers can rely on throughout their development journey. It meets developers where they are by offering SDKs across various platforms providing web and mobile solutions.
It's a lofty goal and one we wanted to experience from a developers point of view. Introducing Firebase Quickdraw!
Our app started out as a collaborative hackathon project. Building from scratch on Firebase and inspired by Google QuickDraw, we set out to make a simple application that uses AI to understand human drawings.
Once the player starts the game, the app picks a random object from a list. After the player begins drawing the object, an AI bot ( Unaware of that target object ), attempts to guess what the drawing is. The bot either guesses correctly, with the game allocating the player points based on time remaining, or the clock runs out with no points allocated. The game repeats this process for 6 rounds.
When the game is completed the player is awarded a ranking on the daily leaderboard and offered the chance to play again. It's a similar idea to the game "Pictionary" as we all know it, but now with an AI bot!
We used multiple Firebase products to power our app. Here is an architecture diagram of the app’s main functionalities:
Static assets were hosted on Firebase Hosting. The combination of small js bundle size and Hosting’s global CDN gave the app a short initial load time.
We used a deployed TensorFlow model for classification. To learn more about how you can deploy AI models, take a look at the newly launched Google Cloud Vertex AI.
Daily score counts were stored in Cloud Firestore with Cloud Functions acting as the glue to bring everything together. Cloud Functions not only provided our client web app an API surface to send and receive the data needed to run the game, but was also used to run a simple cron job updating the daily scores in a Firestore document.
One of the most exciting moments in our little app’s life was when users began arriving through Google I/O’s website. Developers are very familiar with this moment: Your app is launched and users start trickling in for the very first time. It can be daunting since your app presumably has not been under intense traffic strain before and we wondered if our app’s performance might degrade as a result.
No problem! We used Firebase Performance Monitoring to monitor the web app’s load time and recognition API’s response time as more and more users started playing. This was made possible by the recent launch of real time data processing by Firebase Performance Monitoring.
To develop a better understanding of how players were interacting with the app, we used Google Analytics for Firebase, setting up custom events to track how many players started a game vs how many finished while getting insights into the demographics of our users via the easy to use dashboard view.
Firebase does take away a lot of the hassle associated with creating an app. Each of the products we used saved us a ton of time and headaches while enabling us to focus on providing our users a better experience. Firebase Hosting made it as easy to make assets available globally as running a single command (literally!). Firestore allowed us to save, update and use data in a very friendly and efficient way. Cloud Functions was there every time we needed to send and receive data and orchestrate back-end functionalities. And Firebase Performance Monitoring and Google Analytics for Firebase gave us insights into how users were experiencing the app in real time.
This powerful combination of complementary products made creating Firebase QuickDraw a fun journey for our team, we learnt a lot while gaining a better understanding of the development process our customers experience. We hope the many people who attended I/O and played our game had fun too!
As app developers, you want to focus on building functionality that increases the utility of your app for your users. Here at Firebase, our mission is to help app developers succeed, and our services like Firebase Authentication, Firestore, Performance Monitoring, Analytics and others help you focus on what's relevant for developing your app and advancing your business instead of having to build and run infrastructure and services yourself.
With Firebase Extensions, we took this concept to the next level and made it easy for you to quickly add functionality to your app. Instead of having to implement these features yourself, Firebase Extensions allow you to add pre-built and tested functionality with just a few clicks. On top of that, Firebase Extensions are configurable, so you can easily adapt them to your needs.
Solve business problems using Firebase Extensions
But sometimes, you need even more power and flexibility.
For example, you might need an easy-to-use way to set up a marketing campaign that follows all the best practices and industry standards. Sending emails is not enough - you need a solution that supports double opt-in, streamlined and beautiful templates, and a dashboard that provides detailed insights into your campaign.
Or, you might need a customer messaging solution that makes it easy to reach out to your users directly, no matter where they are, to keep them up-to-date on the status of their urgent delivery. And of course you need a solution that grows with your business and works in new markets and countries you're expanding into and supports the local messaging platforms.
Or - you might want to turn your blog about artisanal coffee into a business with a subscription service that allows you to put some of your content behind a paywall.
Implementing all these features and integrations yourself can be a daunting task, and - let's be honest - wouldn't you rather focus on building the core functionality of your app instead of wasting precious time on building solutions for challenges others have already solved? After all, other people have invested a lot of time and thought into building these services, so no need to reinvent the wheel.
With Firebase Extensions, you can leverage existing solutions solve business problems with integrations from industry leaders such as MessageBird, Algolia, Mailchimp, and Stripe.
At Google I/O this year, we announced the following new Firebase Extensions:
And last year, we launched Run Subscription Payments with Stripe and Send Invoices using Stripe, which make it easier to control access to paid content and send brandable invoices using Stripe's payment system.
All of these Extensions are built and maintained by these companies, and are available as open source on GitHub. This means you can read the source code and learn how they were built, adapt them to your specific needs, and even file feature requests for new functionality. Most of our early access users have told us that the configuration options available in the Extensions and the power and flexibility of our partners' services met most of their requirements.
The road ahead
In the spirit of our mission, we want to bring more Firebase Extensions to the platform to enable you to focus on what matters most to you: implementing the best version of your app to solve real business problems and delight your users.
If you have any suggestions for Firebase Extensions, any features you'd like to see us implement, or any partners you'd like us to bring to the platform, please don't hesitate to reach out to us using our feedback form.
We can't wait to see what you build next with the new Firebase Extensions, and look forward to hearing from you!
It's amazing to see you using Crashlytics on so many different Apple products – and even wanting to expand that usage! We have always focused on making Crashlytics the best crash reporter on iOS, from our user-friendly onboarding process, to our lightweight SDK. So we’ve made some updates to ensure you can run the Crashlytics SDK seamlessly on all Apple consumer hardware.
In December 2020, we released full support for Apple Silicon Macs running iOS or macOS apps. This means any of the following configurations running on Apple Silicon will work with Crashlytics:
To make it easier to see crashes on these platforms, we added support for filtering in the Firebase console, using the Device filter. We're already working on improving this experience, so stay tuned!
With the introduction of iOS 14, the number of system libraries and libraries used by apps has increased. These libraries can increase startup time as Crashlytics lists the libraries loaded into the app for symbolicating crash reports. In version 7.5.0 of the Crashlytics SDK, we shipped a change to remove this bottleneck, significantly improving the customer experience. For apps with this version of the SDK, we’ve observed a median startup time of about 14 milliseconds, a 75% reduction!
In addition, we’ve improved the speed of our client-side build tools, especially for apps with large binary and dSYM files. This tool processes dSYMs on your build machine before upload to ensure it matches your build environment and Xcode version as closely as possible. We observed the symbol conversion time for a 600 MB dSYM improved from about 12 minutes to 45 seconds. This will help speed up CI builds for your apps and make it possible to rapidly test crashes locally.
We’ve also invested in making sure we fully support App Clips. Crashlytics continues to be a lightweight crash reporter in terms of binary size, so you shouldn’t have to commit much of your App Clip’s 10 MB limit to the Crashlytics installation.
Recently, the community pitched in to get the Crashlytics SDK running on watchOS, adding support for common crashes and non-fatals. Since watchOS is continuing to build out better support for responding to crashes, we’re always happy to accept contributions to improve this!
Open sourcing the Crashlytics SDK as part of the move to Firebase has brought huge benefits. The community has been integral in determining the popularity of various features, and we want to thank folks who have reached out on GitHub, Firebase Support, and other channels to outline their use cases for Crashlytics. We want to especially thank members of the community who have made code changes to improve the SDK directly.
We are continually investing in support for Apple apps, and there’s more coming to help developers diagnose stability issues with their apps. We’re proud of the investments we’ve made here and are excited to continue supporting the Apple app ecosystem.
In November, we added the first new location for the Realtime Database outside the United States, in Belgium. Today, we are adding Singapore as well. We encourage any Firebase developer with a large userbase in Asia to consider using this new location to reduce latency.
All new and existing Firebase developers can create databases in Singapore. Developers on our paid plan can create multiple databases, even mixing databases in multiple locations within a single project.
We’re also announcing that all three locations — the United States, Belgium, and Singapore — are Generally Available. They are ready for your production data today.
Log into the Firebase console to create a database in Singapore, or check out our documentation to learn how to use our APIs to provision databases programmatically.
We’re delighted that the Realtime Database now has locations around the world, and we can’t wait to see what you build.
If you attended I/O this year, we hope you had some fun in the photo booth with Sparky and his friends, including Flutter's Dash, Android Jetpack and Chrome's Dino. We loved seeing all of the pictures you posted with the Google Developer mascots and your favorite props!
Firebasers having fun in the photo booth!
We partnered with the Flutter team to build the I/O photo booth in Flutter on the web, powered by Firebase. The team used Firebase Auth to support anonymous user sign-in, Firebase security rules to prevent users from modifying or deleting photos after creation, Firebase Hosting for fast and secure hosting of the web app, and Firebase storage and Cloud Functions for Firebase to create the page with your photo for social sharing. Take a closer look at how the photo booth was built using Flutter and Firebase together here!
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!
