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!
In the past three posts, I've introduced readers to Pirate Metrics, and shown how you can boost your acquisition strategy and activation numbers with Firebase products.
In this post, we're going to talk about one of the biggest problems majority of apps face: retention. The hard truth is that most people tend to only use a few applications every week, abandoning a majority of them after just a few tries. This might happen even if you did successfully activate a user.
The goal, for any product, is to become a habit for their users. And, for a person to pick up new habits, they need the help of triggers. The best products carefully use external triggers — things like push notifications, E-mailers — at appropriate times which help building habits.
For years, we have offered powerful tools to help you build these experiences: Google Cloud Messaging. Cloud Messaging is now a part of the Firebase suite of SDKs, becoming even more powerful than before.
The key capability added, thanks to this change, is something we call Firebase Notifications. By simply adding the required dependency to your application, you can now send push notifications to your users straight from the Firebase console. But that's not all: you can target the notification to a required segment. For example, you can inform those users who have shown an interest in a particular product that you have a deal running in your E-commerce application.
While quite useful, particularly considering how little you need to do to add them to your app, sending Push Notifications is a manual process and best utilized for campaigns. To truly improve your product, you need to first understand when you tend to lose your users, and build a system that helps you retain them.
The first part can be solved using the cohorts from Firebase Analytics. Cohorts help you visualise your retention by showing you what percentage of users do you retain over a period of time, broken down by days or weeks. Most of your users are typically lost in the first couple of days, which is usually an issue with your activation strategy. However, this decline tends to flatten out.
While you should certainly work on your activation strategy to help improve your cohort numbers on the first couple of days, you also want to look at some way to improve the numbers a little later, such as around days 5-7. One fairly straightforward solution is to build an automated system that sends push notifications using Firebase Cloud Messaging to these users approximately a week after they sign up. Using some kind of flag for "last used time", you could also ensure this notification is only shown to those users who are at risk of being dropped off.
You could utilize this strategy for things like extending trial periods for users who haven't used your product enough, giving yourself an extended opportunity to convert them into paying customers. Deals of any other form (either for E-commerce products or for in-app products) are other ways.
A carefully crafted strategy could play a critical role in your overall business. Do be mindful of avoiding a spammy notification system: you'll probably annoy your users and increase your uninstall count.
There are additional possibilities as well. Firebase Analytics tracks uninstalled users for you using the automated event "app_remove". As mentioned in the second post on acquisition, you can create an audience for users who have fired this event and retarget them using Adwords.
Also, using Firebase App Indexing in your application would help highlight content from your service in Google search results for your users. This is particularly useful during the early phases of the user's time with you when they haven't quite developed a habit of using your application directly.
We're excited to announce the full speaker list and agenda for the first ever Firebase Dev Summit!
Find the latest schedule on our newly launched site here featuring sessions such as How to Develop Rock Solid Apps with Firebase, a Firebase Analytics deep dive, Develop Mobile Apps without Infrastructure , and more!
The Firebase Dev Summit is on Monday, November 7th with a full day of talks, codelabs and office hours. The Summit will end with an afterparty where you can enjoy drum and bass and mix and mingle with event attendees and the Firebase team.
Tickets are sold out, but you can sign up for the waitlist to be notified if a spot becomes available. We will also livestream the entire event in case you want to join us online. Sign up to receive an receive an email alert when sessions are about to start!
We want to hear from you! Join the conversation on Slack, G+ and Twitter.
Hey there, Firebase Developers!
We wanted to let you know that we've made some new updates to the Firebase libraries for iOS, Android, as well as the Javascript SDK. You can read the full release notes here, but let's give you a quick summary of some of the new features you should be aware of:
You can read our release notes for iOS, Android, and web platforms to get all the details. Or you can just start playing around with the new libraries. That's fun, too.
Happy hacking!
Private Backups is a good solution for backing up, scripting, and gathering analytics by regularly exporting your entire Database. Previously, setup involved a bit of back and forth between the user and Firebase Support. We are now offering a self-service user interface for Blaze customers in the Firebase console that seamlessly enables daily backups of your Firebase Database to a Google Cloud Storage bucket.
To get started, visit the new “Backups” tab in the Database section of the Firebase console, and the wizard will guide you through setting up your automated backups.
To save on storage costs, we enable Gzip compression by default, and you can choose to enable a 30-day lifecycle policy to have backups older than 30 days automatically purged.
When the setup process is complete, you will have a Google Cloud Storage bucket. On a daily basis, we will backup your Database’s application data and rules in JSON format to your bucket. You can view the status and history of all your backups directly in the Firebase console. There is also a “Manual Backup” button which lets you instantly enqueue a current backup of your database and rules, and is incredibly useful to take specific timed snapshots or as a safety action before you perform any code changes.
Here are three good reasons to start using automated backup today:
Offline Scripting
Automatic Database Backups let you crawl, analyze, and perform large scripted actions against your data without affecting the realtime performance of your customers connecting to the Database.
Historical Data Analysis
With historical snapshots of your database, you can retroactively analyze your data, look for trends, and make product decisions based on past data points.
Recovery From Corrupt or Lost Data
With Automatic Database Backups, you can easily restore your data in the event of data corruption or loss. To restore your database, simply download1 a backup file to your local machine from the backups tab. You can then click the "Import JSON" button2 under the data tab to restore your Database to a previously backed-up state.
We are continuing to streamline the experience for Firebase developers, and this new release gives developers more control over their data while reducing the need to go through support processes.
With Gzip enabled, you will need to decompress your database data before importing back into Firebase. ↩
For very large Databases, it is more efficient to contact support for data restoration from our own regular backups, rather than through the JSON files of Automatic Database Backups. ↩
