At Firebase, our mission is to help mobile app teams succeed, which means having the capabilities to support companies and teams of all sizes and complexity. In the last couple of years, we've matured significantly, from a realtime database to a full mobile app development platform. Firebase is built on top of Google Cloud, so you get all the technical scale, enterprise-grade access control and management, and machine learning strength that underpins many of Google's products. Today, we're excited to share a few new products and features that will help you build better apps, improve your app quality, and grow your business.
Firebase has a number of products to help you engage with your users and grow your business, from machine learning powered targeting with Firebase Predictions, to app optimization without republishing via Remote Config, to re-engaging lapsed users with Cloud Messaging. Today we're adding a new product, Firebase In-App Messaging, to round out the tools available for growing your user base, as well as making improvements to a couple of our existing products.
Notifications are a great way to bring users back into your app. But how do you ensure your users are interacting with your app in the right, intended way instead of fumbling between screens without taking any meaningful action? How do you guide them through your app experience?
Today, we're launching Firebase In-App Messaging to help you guide app users who are actively using your app by sending them targeted and contextual messages. Now, you'll be able to communicate with your most valuable users - the ones already interacting with your app - and deepen engagement with them by surfacing relevant information, offers, and tips as they use your app!
Messages can be customized by format, color, and CTA, allowing you to keep your messages on brand with your app. In-App Messaging is also integrated with Google Analytics for Firebase and Firebase Predictions, making it easy for you to target messages based on user profile data like app version, current behavior like a button click, or predicted future behavior like risk of churning. In-App Messaging is starting to roll out today; check out our documentation for more detail.
The Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) console and APIs let you send notifications and data messages to your users on iOS, Android, and web, but understanding how your notifications are performing across all these different platforms is hard. The new FCM reporting dashboard gives teams a central place to view key messaging stats like sends, impressions, and opens, so they can easily understand how their messages are performing. In addition to aggregating all these statistics, the reporting dashboard also gives you insight into your API sends from the console, for the first time.
Developers can use this information to monitor the health of their notification functionality, such as a dip in sends after the release of a new update, as well as use insights on notification sends and opens to improve notification strategy, like monitoring how the title of a notification impacts open rates. The FCM reporting dashboard allows you to filter sends by date, platform (iOS or Android), and type (data message or notification), making it easy to find the data you're looking for.
Previously, if you wanted to check what Remote Config values you've used in the past, you had to keep track manually. In one-person teams this is a hassle, but for large teams, where lots of different developers could be changing the project's Remote Config at once, this was nearly impossible.
Today, we are happy to announce that we're adding change history to Remote Config. Firebase saves 300 versions of a project's Remote Config for up to 90 days. You'll be able to see how parameters and conditions have changed over time and if you ever want to roll back to a previous version, all you have to do is click the rollback button.
We're beginning to roll out change history for Remote Config today and it will be fully available to all projects in a couple of days. Click here to see the technical documentation.
Change history in Remote Config
When the Fabric team joined Firebase last year, we were very excited to learn from their expertise in building tools for crash reporting and debugging. Over the last 18 months, we've made big steps to make Firebase into a platform that you can use to improve your app quality, including bringing Fabric's Crashlytics to Firebase. Today, we're excited to announce a number of improvements to Crashlytics, that help it integrate better with existing tools that developer teams use.
We've heard from you that you rely on a variety of different tools to make your business successful. We want to meet you where you're already working and empower you to use the best tool for the job. That's why we're launching a couple of new integrations for Firebase Crashlytics.
First of all, you'll now be able to export your Crashlytics data from Firebase to BigQuery, allowing you to run your own analysis on deobfuscated crash reports, including any metadata such as custom keys and values, logs, and user IDs. You can then visualize data and view trends with Data Studio or any other business analytics tool you use. You'll also be able to take ownership of your data in BigQuery by setting your own retention and deletion policies.
Secondly, we're launching an integration with Jira Software that allows you to create Jira issues based on crashes reported in Firebase. Combined with the existing integration with Slack, your team can now track the crashes they are working on, with tools they already use. The Jira integration will be rolling out over the coming weeks and if you want to manage your Firebase integrations now, you can visit the settings tab in the console.
Core to Firebase's DNA are a set of products that help developers like you build mobile backend infrastructure quickly and easily. After all, it began with a Realtime Database. We've been working closely with Google Cloud Platform to build a next generation of serverless backend tools, like Cloud Firestore and Cloud Functions, and we're continuing to improve on those products. We're also launching a couple of enhancements to Firebase Hosting that we hope will help you build websites more efficiently.
A few weeks ago at Cloud Next 2018, we introduced a number of improvements to Cloud Firestore and Cloud Functions for Firebase. Cloud Firestore now lets you scale your database up to 10,000 writes per second and 1 million concurrent users to handle any surges in traffic. Cloud Functions is now GA and ready for production use -- with predictable service guaranteed by an SLA. If you're looking to build your infrastructure in certain parts of the world, both Cloud Firestore and Cloud Functions will be supporting new regions in Europe and Asia over the next few months.
Another piece of feedback we've consistently heard is that you don't always have a one-to-one relationship between Firebase projects and hosted websites. Over the next couple weeks, we'll be rolling out an improvement to Firebase Hosting that allows you to host multiple websites within one project.
Additionally, when pushing an update to a site, the Firebase CLI (from v4.1.0) now only uploads the files that have changed between releases. This dramatically speeds up the process, letting you work more efficiently.
The Project Overview page in the console has received a major update, bringing together data from all different parts of Firebase to give you a single view into the health of your app, services and business. In addition to the analytics and crash data that's always been present you can now view performance issues, notification and A/B test status, and the usage and health data for other Firebase services like Functions, Hosting, and Storage, among others.
You'll also notice that the Latest Release section of the console will now have live data. This was one of our top requested improvements to analytics in the console and we're excited to be able to provide it for you.
All of these improvements are beginning to roll out today and will be available to everybody within a couple of weeks.
Thank you, as always, for being a part of the Firebase community. We strive to create a community that is welcoming to developers of all backgrounds and companies of all levels of sophistication. Your feedback and questions are invaluable in shaping the future of Firebase, so, as always, you can find us via any of our support channels.
If you'd like to meet the team in person, please join us at the annual Firebase Summit on October 29th in Prague, Czech Republic for a day full of technical sessions, hands-on instructor-led codelabs, and another round of new updates. Hope to see you there!
When the folks at Fabric joined Firebase earlier this year, we aligned around a common mission: provide developers like you with a platform that solves common problems across the app development lifecycle, so you can focus on building an awesome user experience.
One area — among many — where Fabric excelled was in its console and dashboards. We've been hard at work for the last several months, working with them to bring together the best parts of Fabric and Firebase. Today, we're excited to share some improvements to the Firebase console.
We started by redesigning the navigation, to more accurately reflect the way your team works. We've clustered Firebase products into four groups: Develop, Stability, Analytics, and Grow. All of the products that you're used to seeing in the Firebase console are still there; we've simply reorganized them in a way that makes it simpler to navigate between them as you use more products across the Firebase platform.
We've also redesigned the Project Home screen in the Firebase console to bring a few important metrics front and center. Now, when you first open a project in Firebase, you'll see four key metrics: 30-day crash-free user rate, 30-day crashes, daily active users, and monthly active users, along with graphs that displays these trends over time. In research, we found that the vast majority of the time, developers are looking for one of those four metrics, so we made them easily accessible from the Project Home landing page.
Another well-loved Fabric console feature is the Latest Release section. This dashboard gives you all the most important insights from your most recent app release, so you can get a quick snapshot of what's going well and what might need to be rolled back. We've brought this section into the redesigned Firebase Console; you'll find it under the Analytics section of the navigation bar.
Starting today, you'll also see an Analytics dashboard that is organized into simple cards underneath an easy to understand question. Organizing data around jargon like "DAUs" or "retention cohorts" is difficult to navigate, so we've restructured the dashboard around questions you have about your app, like "where are my users engaged?" Or "how well do I retain users?" Our research confirmed that 90% of users preferred this design and we hope you find it helpful too!
Another thing we've learned from our friends at Fabric and heard from all of you is that having information in realtime is critical. Whether you're tracking a new app release or monitoring the status of a bug fix, you need to understand what's happening in your app in realtime, so you can make changes and prioritize work accordingly.
To help with this, we've added realtime data on crashes and active users to a card that you'll see in the new Analytics dashboard, as well as the Latest Release section of the console. This is just the first step and, over time, we plan to make realtime data more prevalent across the rest of the Firebase console.
As always, you can contact us at https://firebase.google.com/support/ with feedback and questions. Happy building!
For many years, developers and app teams have relied on Crashlytics to improve their app stability. By now, you're probably familiar with the main parts of the Crashlytics UI; perhaps you even glance at crash-free users, crash-free sessions, and the issues list multiple times a day (you wouldn't be the only one!).
In this post, we want to share 7 pro-tips that will help you get even more value out of Crashlytics, which is now part of the new Fabric dashboard, so you can track, prioritize, and solve issues faster.
In July, we officially released crash insights out of beta. Crash insights helps you understand your crashes better by giving you more context and clarity on why those crashes occurred. When you see a green lightning bolt appear next to an issue in your issues list, click on it to see potential root causes and troubleshooting resources.
Debugging and troubleshooting crashes is time-consuming, hard work. As developers ourselves, we understand the urge to sign-off and return to more exciting tasks (like building new app features) as soon you resolve a pesky issue - but don't forget to mark this issue as "closed" in Crashlytics! When you formally close out an issue, you get enhanced visibility into that issue's lifecycle through regression detection. Regression detection alerts you when a previously closed issue reoccurs in a new app version, which is a signal that something else may be awry and you should pay close attention to it.
As a general rule of thumb, you should close issues so you can monitor regression. However, you can also close and lock issues that you don't want to be notified about because you're unlikely to fix or prioritize them. These could be low-impact, obscure bugs or issues that are beyond your control because the problem isn't in your code. To keep these issues out of view and declutter your Crashlytics charts, you can close and lock them. By taking advantage of this "ignore functionality", you can fine tune your stability page so only critical information that needs action bubbles up to the top.
Sometimes, you may have multiple builds of the same version. These build versions start with the same number, but the tail end contains a unique identifier (such as 9.12 (123), 9.12 (124), 9.12 (125), etc). If you want to see crashes for all of these versions, don't manually type them into the search bar. Instead, use a wildcard to group similar versions together much faster. You can do this by simply adding a star (aka. an asterisk) at the end of your version prefix (i.e. 9.12*). For example, if you use APK Splits on Android, a wildcard build will quickly show you crashes for the combined set of builds.
As a developer, you probably deploy a handful of builds each day. As a development team, that number can shoot up to tens or hundreds of builds. The speed and agility with which mobile teams ship is impressive and awesome. But you know what's not awesome? Wasting time having to comb through your numerous builds to find the one (or two, or three, etc.) that matter the most. That's why Crashlytics allows you to "pin" key builds so that they appear at the top of your builds list. Pinned builds allow you to find your most important builds faster and keep them front and center, for as long as you need. Plus, this feature makes it easier to collaborate with your teammates on fixing crashes because pinned builds will automatically appear at the top of their builds list too.
Stability issues can pop up anytime - even when you're away from your workstation. Crashlytics intelligently monitors your builds to check if one issue has caused a statistically significant number of crashes. If so, we'll let you know if you need to ship a hot fix of your app via a velocity alert. Velocity alerts are proactive alerts that appear right in your crash reporting dashboard when an issue suddenly increases in severity or impact. We'll send you an email too, but you should also install the Fabric mobile app, which will send you a push notification so you can stay in the loop even on the go. Keep an eye out for velocity alerts and you'll never miss a critical crash, no matter where you are!
The Crashlytics SDK lets you instrument logs, keys, non-fatals, and custom events, which provide additional information and context on why a crash occurred and what happened leading up to it. However, logs, keys, non-fatals, and custom events are designed to track different things so let's review the right way to use them.
Logs: You should instrument logs to gather important information about user activity before a crash. This could be user behavior (ex. user went to download screen, clicked on download button) to details about the user's action (ex. image downloaded, image downloaded from). Basically, logs are breadcrumbs that show you what happened prior to a crash. When a crash occurs, we take the contents of the log and attach it to the crash to help you debug faster. Here are instructions for instrumenting logs for iOS, Android, and Unity apps.
Keys: Keys are key value pairs, which provide a snapshot of information at one point in time. Unlike logs, which record a timeline of activity, keys record the last known value and change over time. Since keys are overwritten, you should use keys for something that you would only want the last known value for. For example, use keys to track the last level a user completed, the last step a user completed in a wizard, what image the user looked at last, and what the last custom settings configuration was. Keys are also helpful in providing a summary or "roll-up" of information. For instance, if your log shows "login, retry, retry, retry" your key would show "retry count: 3." To set up keys, follow these instructions for iOS, Android, and Unity apps.
Non-fatals: While Crashlytics captures crashes automatically, you can also record non-fatal events. Non-fatal events mean that your app is experiencing an error, but not actually crashing.
For example, a good scenario to log a non-fatal is if your app has deep links, but fails to navigate to them. A broken link isn't something that will necessarily crash your app, but it's something you'd want to track so you can fix the link. A bad scenario to log a non-fatal is if an image fails to load in your app due to a network failure because this isn't actionable or specific.
You should set up non-fatal events for something you want the stack trace for so you can triage and troubleshoot the issue.
If you simply want to count the number of times something happens (and don't need the stack trace), we'd recommend checking out custom events.
These 7 tips will help you get the most out of Crashlytics. If you have other pro-tips that have helped you improve your app stability with Crashlytics, tweet them at us! We can't wait to learn more about how you use Crashlytics.
Get Crashlytics
Every mobile developer needs to take app screenshots in order to have their app listed on the app stores. Like a book cover, screenshots are crucial in depicting the best parts of your app and convincing potential users to download it.
Unfortunately, generating app screenshots is a huge pain because they take a ton of time, especially if your app supports different locales and languages. For example, if you need to take 5 screenshots for your app store listing - but your app supports 20 languages for 6 devices - you'll manually have to take 600 screenshots (5 x 20 x 6)! It makes us shudder to think how many precious hours that would eat up.
fastlane's snapshot tool automates the process of taking screenshots (in the background) so you can focus on building features users love. Today, we're excited to share that snapshot now supports multiple, concurrent simulators for iOS apps in Xcode 9. Taking screenshots just got even faster because you can now generate screenshots for all of your devices at the same time!
Before Xcode 9, only one simulator could be running at a time, which means that you had to run snapshot once for each device you wish to support. While snapshot automated the process of taking screenshots, we wanted to make things even easier.
The launch of Xcode 9 gave us another opportunity to improve snapshot. In Xcode 9, multiple UI tests can run simultaneously, so we added multiple simulator support to snapshot as well. Now, you can take screenshots for all specified devices with a single command, at the same time. This drastically shortens the time it takes to generate your screenshots.
Here's an example:
fastlane's mission is to save you time by automating the cumbersome tasks of app deployment, even as mobile evolves. That's why we're fully committed to updating the fastlane toolset to take advantage of new releases and features - such as Xcode 9.
And since fastlane is open source, we're so thankful that our community also helps us make fastlane better by building and using plugins. In fact, we now have more user-generated plugins available for you to try than native fastlane actions. We recently reorganized these plugins to make it easier to find the right plugins for your unique needs.
We always strive to anticipate your needs and build our tools to be ready for the future. To start using the new version of snapshot, simply update fastlane and run snapshot as you normally would. If you're taking screenshots manually, check out our guide to start using snapshot (and enjoy the extra free time!). As always, we can't wait to hear what you think!
We've all been in this situation before: you work tirelessly to build a great app, you spend countless hours beta testing and fixing bugs, and you even put together a comprehensive marketing plan in time for your app's launch. Months of anticipation finally culminate when you submit your app to the app store… but instead of celebrating the new release, you find out that your app didn't meet the right criteria for listing so it got rejected 😱.
There's nothing quite as deflating as tripping at the finish line.
App store guidelines can be complicated and hard to remember because they're constantly changing, but developers still need to follow them in order to get their apps approved. Sometimes, these guidelines get overlooked or lost in the shuffle of all the other important pre-launch tasks. To help you avoid unnecessary delays and rejection, we're excited to introduce fastlane precheck for iOS apps! You can count on us to remember the rules so you can submit your app with confidence.
Often, apps get rejected from app stores because of simple, solvable issues with their metadata (such as title, description, changelog, keywords, etc.). Once rejected, you have to resubmit your app and it can take days before it's reviewed again. This wastes time and can throw off your schedule.
Instead of risking rejection or painstakingly auditing your own metadata, you can now use fastlane precheck to save you the time and hassle. fastlane will review your app for the most common causes of rejection 👍.
For example, we'll check your metadata to ensure it follows iOS app store rules such as:
If we detect any issues, we'll flag them for you so you can resolve them before you submit your app to the app store. And since fastlane can automatically download your app's metadata, this whole process takes only seconds!
fastlane precheck is the first new tool we've added to our app automation toolkit since joining Google - and we have even more exciting updates planned! Now that we've settled into our new home, we can't wait to move fastlane forward with our passionate community of iOS and Android developers.
In the meantime, install fastlane or update your version of fastlane (just run `fastlane update_fastlane`) to try precheck and submit your app with confidence and peace of mind 🚀.
It's been an exciting year! Last May, we expanded Firebase into our unified app platform, building on the original backend-as-a-service and adding products to help developers grow their user base, as well as test and monetize their apps. Hearing from developers like Wattpad, who built an app using Firebase in only 3 weeks, makes all the hard work worthwhile.
Heading to WWDC this year? Join us at the Firebase + Fabric party on June 5th as we celebrate with the top iOS developers from around the world.
We’re excited to throw our very first iOS developers party at this year’s conference - co-hosting with our teammates at Fabric who’re also deeply passionate about mobile development. If you’re going to be in town, join us for a night to mingle with other developers, meet engineers and PMs from the Firebase and Fabric team, showcase your latest app, or whatever strikes your mood.
We look forward to hearing about all the cool stuff you’ve been working on.
Tickets are limited so request your invite today!
Google I/O is rapidly sneaking up on us. I hope those of you attending have your bags packed by now, and those joining on the live stream have started marking the sessions you want to see. It's quite a lineup.
