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.
Posted by the Firebase team
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.
