Heading to WWDC this year? Join us at the Firebase party on June 4th as we celebrate with the top iOS developers from around the world.
We're excited to once again throw a party for our community at this year's conference. If you're going to be in town, join us for a night to mingle with other developers, meet engineers and product leads from the Firebase team, and relax after the first day of WWDC.
We look forward to hearing about all the cool stuff you've been working on.
Tickets are limited so request your invite today! (Note: a confirmed ticket is required for entry)
In today's fast-moving world, people have come to expect mobile apps to be intelligent - adapting to users' activity or delighting them with surprising smarts. As a result, we think machine learning will become an essential tool in mobile development. That's why on Tuesday at Google I/O, we introduced ML Kit in beta: a new SDK that brings Google's machine learning expertise to mobile developers in a powerful, yet easy-to-use package on Firebase. We couldn't be more excited!
Getting started with machine learning can be difficult for many developers. Typically, new ML developers spend countless hours learning the intricacies of implementing low-level models, using frameworks, and more. Even for the seasoned expert, adapting and optimizing models to run on mobile devices can be a huge undertaking. Beyond the machine learning complexities, sourcing training data can be an expensive and time consuming process, especially when considering a global audience.
With ML Kit, you can use machine learning to build compelling features, on Android and iOS, regardless of your machine learning expertise. More details below!
If you are a beginner or want to implement a solution quickly, ML Kit gives you five ready-to-use ("base") APIs that address common mobile use cases:
With these base APIs, you simply pass in data to ML Kit and get back an intuitive response. For example: Lose It!, one of our early users, used ML Kit to build several features in the latest version of their calorie tracker app. Using our text recognition based API and a custom built model, their app can quickly capture nutrition information from product labels to input a food's content from an image.
ML Kit gives you both on-device and Cloud APIs, all in a common and simple interface, allowing you to choose the ones that fit your requirements best. The on-device APIs process data quickly and will work even when there's no network connection, while the cloud-based APIs leverage the power of Google Cloud Platform's machine learning technology to give a higher level of accuracy.
See these ready-to-use APIs in the Firebase console:
Heads up: We're planning to release two more APIs in the coming months. First is a smart reply API allowing you to support contextual messaging replies in your app, and the second is a high density face contour addition to the face detection API. Sign up here to give them a try!
If you're seasoned in machine learning and you don't find a base API that covers your use case, ML Kit lets you deploy your own TensorFlow Lite models. You simply upload them via the Firebase console, and we'll take care of hosting and serving them to your app's users. This way you can keep your models out of your APK/bundles which reduces your app install size. Also, because ML Kit serves your model dynamically, you can always update your model without having to re-publish your apps.
But there is more. As apps have grown to do more, their size has increased, harming app store install rates, and with the potential to cost users more in data overages. Machine learning can further exacerbate this trend since models can reach 10's of megabytes in size. So we decided to invest in model compression. Specifically, we are experimenting with a feature that allows you to upload a full TensorFlow model, along with training data, and receive in return a compressed TensorFlow Lite model. The technology behind this is evolving rapidly and so we are looking for a few developers to try it and give us feedback. If you are interested, please sign up here.
Since ML Kit is available through Firebase, it's easy for you to take advantage of the broader Firebase platform. For example, Remote Config and A/B testing lets you experiment with multiple custom models. You can dynamically switch values in your app, making it a great fit to swap the custom models you want your users to use on the fly. You can even create population segments and experiment with several models in parallel.
Other examples include:
We can't wait to see what you'll build with ML Kit. We hope you'll love the product like many of our early customers:
Get started with the ML Kit beta by visiting your Firebase console today. If you have any thoughts or feedback, feel free to let us know - we're always listening!
It’s hard to believe that it’s only been two years since we expanded Firebase at I/O 2016 from a set of backend services to a full app development platform. In the time since then, it’s been humbling to watch the developer community embrace Firebase. We now have 1.2 million apps actively using Firebase every month!
No matter how much we grow, our mission remains the same: to help mobile app teams be successful across every stage of your development cycle, from building your app, to improving app quality, to growing your business.
Having such an amazing developer community is both a huge honor and a huge responsibility. Thank you for trusting us with your apps. It’s inspiring to hear the stories about what you’ve built with Firebase and your success is the reason we’re excited to come to work everyday!
Today, we’re announcing a number of improvements to Firebase. Let’s take a look.
Machine learning just got easier for mobile developers. We’re excited to announce ML Kit, an SDK available on Firebase that lets you bring powerful machine learning features to your app whether it's on Android or iOS, and whether you're an experienced ML developer or you're just getting started.
ML Kit comes with a set of ready-to-use APIs for common use cases: recognizing text, detecting faces, scanning barcodes, labeling images and recognizing landmarks. These APIs can run on-device or in the cloud, depending on the functionality. The on-device APIs process data quickly and will work even when there's no network connection, while the cloud-based APIs leverage the power of Google Cloud Platform's machine learning technology to give a higher level of accuracy. You can also bring in your own TensorFlow Lite models for advanced use-cases, and ML Kit will take care of the hosting and serving, letting you focus on building your app.
These five APIs are just the first step. We'll be rolling out more in the future and if you want to be involved as an early tester, please visit our signup form to join the waiting list.
Whether you're building on Android or iOS, you can improve the experience for your users by leveraging machine learning. And with ML Kit, we hope to make it easy for developers of all experience levels to get started today. Visit our docs to learn more.
At I/O last year, we launched Performance Monitoring into beta to help you gain insight into your app's performance so you can keep it fast and responsive. Since then, we've seen tremendous adoption. Some of the largest apps in the world — like Flipkart, Ola, and Swiggy — have started using Performance Monitoring and we now report 100 billion performance metrics every day, helping developers improve their app's quality and make their users happy!
Now that the SDK is battle-tested, we've decided to graduate Performance Monitoring out of beta. With this change comes a couple of improvements that you'll see rolling out into the console today.
First, you'll now see an issues feed at the top of the Performance Monitoring dashboard. This feed gives you a quick and easy look at any performance issues occurring across your app, as well as Firebase's opinion on the severity of the issue.
Second, you can now easily identify parts of your app that stutter or freeze. Performance monitoring identifies rendering issues, telling you how many frames are dropped per screen in your app, so you can quickly troubleshoot the issue. If you have apps in the Play store, this is a great way to get detailed information on rendering issues reported in Android vitals, without writing additional code. You can get started with Performance Monitoring today by visiting our documentation.
With Google Analytics for Firebase, you've always been able to see analytics for each of your project's apps. Last year, we added the ability to see your data in real time, with the addition of the StreamView and DebugView reports. Now, you'll notice that we've added real time cards throughout your Analytics reports to give you a better idea of what your users are doing right now.
Analytics is also getting two more upgrades with the addition of project level reporting and flexible filters. Project level reporting lets you see what's happening across all the apps in a project, so you have a more holistic view of your app business, while flexible filters allows you to slice your data more precisely to produce key insights. These updates will be rolling out in the coming weeks.
We're launching another update to the Firebase console today: improved identity and access management. This will allow you to more easily invite others to collaborate on your projects and control what they have access to, all from within the Firebase console.
At Firebase, it's always been vitally important to us to build products that work for development on both Android and iOS. That's why it's particularly exciting to announce that we're expanding Test Lab to include iOS, in addition to Android.
Test Lab provides you with physical and virtual devices that allow you to run tests to simulate actual usage environments. With the addition of Test Lab for iOS, we help you get your app into a high quality state - across both Android and iOS - before you even release it.
Test Lab for iOS will be rolling out over the coming months. If you want to be an early tester of the product, you can sign-up in this form to get on the waiting list today.
It’s been an amazing journey at Firebase so far and we believe that we’re only getting started. By continuing to deepen our integrations with Google Cloud Platform, we aim to make it easy for you to leverage the enormous scale of Google’s infrastructure. We’re also immensely excited about the possibilities that machine learning holds for empowering developers like you. Predictions and ML Kit are the first two steps, but there’s much more we hope to do.
Thank you, as always, for being part of the journey with us. To hear about many of these announcements and more in detail, you can check out our YouTube playlist for recordings of all our talks at Google I/O. If you’re not already part of the Firebase Alpha program, please join and help shape the future of the platform. We can’t wait to see what you build next.
Here at Firebase, we want to make sure you and your users don't ever need to think about the dark underbelly of securing identities and managing users. That's why we're here! We've been hard at work making Firebase Authentication even better, and today I'd love to take you through some of the new functionality we've delivered in an effort to make registering and signing in users even easier.
We've heard loud and clear that our existing mail relay service wasn't providing the high standards you expect from Firebase. Over the last few months, we've not only rolled out the ability to configure your own custom SMTP server, but we've been working incredibly hard to move to a new, highly performant mail service, powered by Google. For more than 99% of Firebase Auth projects, we've performed this migration behind the scenes. Feedback so far has been resoundingly positive and we've heard from a lot of you that this has offered much-needed performance improvements. For our customers that have not yet made the move, we're excited to get you onto the new platform! You have received instructions on a manual verification step that needs to be taken, but if you're having any issues, please don't hesitate to reach out to support.
With this new functionality, your users will be able to seamlessly authenticate to your app simply by clicking a link in their email. No need to remember complex passwords or another set of credentials. We've worked really hard to ensure that users will continue to have the same level of security with an even better authentication experience, and we're excited to finally get this into the hands of our developers. I for one am glad to have one less password to remember!
This functionality is available now for Android, iOS and Web.
Using the Admin SDK, we've had the ability to add and evaluate custom claims in ID tokens for quite some time, as well as providing other useful claims in the ID token payload, such as expiration and issued-at time. We heard from many developers out there that you wanted to customize user experience on the client based on these claim values. Some interesting use-cases are around customizing look and feel based on a specific role or permission or showing additional features to administrators/managers. With that in mind, we've extended the flexibility of custom claims to enable you to consume these values directly from your client app.
We're excited about this change, but want to be sure we reiterate some of our best practices for custom claims:
Traditionally, Firebase Authentication sessions have lived on the client side with a short-lived authentication token (1 hour) and refresh token that was available indefinitely. Many of you out there have told us that you wanted far more granularity and control server-side as to how long a user's session could last. We heard your calls and want to ensure that you never have to go through the trouble of spinning up servers, databases and cryptography systems to roll your own session management system, so we've released this set of new controls directly inside of Firebase Authentication.
With this release, we introduce the capability to issue JWT-based session cookies from the Firebase Admin SDK. This will allow you to create session cookies with custom expiration times ranging from 5 minutes to 2 weeks and still retain all the benefits of custom claims client-side to provide logic and customization to your application.
We've got more details as well as samples of our session management capabilities available in our Admin SDK docs.
The Firebase Authentication team will be at I/O 2018, and we'd love to see you there! We're hosting Authentication Office Hours during the event, and the team will be there to take your questions, discuss some of our awesome new features, or even just to say hi. Look for more details closer to the event. We look forward to seeing you there.
In 2016, we unveiled Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) as the next evolution of Google Cloud Messaging (GCM). Since then, we've been working hard to make Firebase Cloud Messaging even more powerful than its predecessor. Like GCM, Firebase Cloud Messaging allows you to send notifications and data messages reliably to iOS, Android, and the Web at no cost. In addition, FCM includes a host of new features, such as an intuitive notifications interface in the Firebase console, better reporting, and native integrations with other Firebase products. With FCM, you can target and test notifications to re-engage your users with greater ease and efficiency.
We're excited to devote more time and attention to improving FCM. That's why today we're announcing that all developers will need to upgrade to FCM within a year. The GCM server and client APIs have been deprecated and will be removed as soon as April 11th, 2019. We recommend you upgrade sooner rather than later so you can start taking advantage of the new features we're building in FCM right away!
To help you through the upgrade, we've created a step-by-step migration guide and answered a few of the most common questions you'll probably have below.
What else is new in FCM?
Once you upgrade, you'll be able to use all of the new features and functionality available in FCM, like platform overrides and topic combinations. You'll also be able to send notifications directly from the Firebase console! What's more, FCM integrates seamlessly with other Firebase products like A/B Testing and Predictions.
Want to test different messages to see which one drives more conversions? You can use FCM with A/B Testing to run experiments to optimize your notifications. Want to engage users who are likely to churn or spend money in your app? You can use FCM with Predictions to target notifications to users based on their predicted behavior.
These are some of the awesome features you'll have at your fingertips with FCM. In the future, we'll be adding many more!
Will I still be able to send messages to my existing users?
If you have projects that are still using the GCM APIs, you will need to update your client and server code to use FCM before April 11, 2019. But rest assured, your existing GCM tokens will continue to work with FCM so you won't lose the ability to send messages to your existing users.
How do I upgrade?
The full process is outlined in our migration guide, or if you prefer video content, you can also check out this Firecast for details.
On a high level, upgrading consists of three main parts: console-side, app-side, and server-side.
Keep in mind that you don't have to complete all three parts of the process in one sitting - you can take it at your own pace. For example, you can choose to configure the console today and work on the app code another time. You're also free to update your app's code right now, and tackle the server-side requirements later.
What happens to my users who don't update their apps?
As long as users have GCM logic in their apps, they will still receive messages. FCM is backwards compatible with GCM, so even if you don't update your server endpoint now, you can still update your app's logic, and vice versa.
What data will Firebase collect and use? I'm concerned about privacy.
Please see the Firebase terms and the Firebase Privacy and Security Policy. You can disable Google Analytics for Firebase to reduce the amount of data that is collected, but keep in mind this will also disable some FCM features.
What if I still have questions?
We're here to help you through the upgrade process. Check out this nifty FAQ page as a start. We also encourage you to post your questions on StackOverflow. Or, feel free to reach out to Firebase support through any of these means.
To save you clicking time, here are some of the links that are also worth a read. Start with the upgrade guide, and then check out the other links to find out more.
What if I already migrated?
Awesome! How'd it go? Tweet me at @ThatJenPerson to tell me what went well and what didn't. Sharing your experience helps us make improvements!
We look forward to welcoming you to FCM, the next evolution of GCM!
