Here at Firebase, we believe developers play an instrumental role in helping people learn, live better, go places, and grow businesses. That’s why we’re committed to providing you with integrated, easy-to-use, and extensible tools so you can continue to create experiences that billions of people not only rely on, but love.
Millions of apps actively use Firebase every month, created by businesses of all sizes, from startups to global enterprises. Your trust in us is what motivates and inspires us to make Firebase even better. Today, Firebase Summit is returning as a virtual event and we’re excited to unveil updates to our platform that will help you accelerate app development, run your app with confidence, and scale with ease. Read on for more details on what’s new, and don’t forget to check out all of the great content (including technical sessions, demos, pathways, and more) from the summit on our event website!
Jump to a particular section if you’re short on time, or read the entire article below.
Gain actionable insights to run your app with confidence
Scale with ease by using powerful engagement tools
Firebase helps you get your app up and running by providing fully-managed infrastructure, with a streamlined experience, that lets you focus on what matters most.
Firebase Extensions are pre-packaged bundles of code that automate common development tasks and let you add functionality to your app in fewer steps. We’ve been partnering with companies you know and trust so you can integrate multiple services without learning new APIs. Our friends at Stripe recently added one-time payments and an SDK to their Run Payments with Stripe extension. Plus, they just launched a new feature that lets you accept over 15 different payment methods including wallets, bank redirects, and "Buy now, Pay later" within your app.
We’re also unveiling new Extensions for adding critical e-commerce features to your app in less time. These Extensions can help you ship and track merchandise with ShipEngine, re-engage users who abandon their shopping carts with SendGrid emails or SMS messages via Twilio, and implement search on Cloud Firestore with Elastic. You can even add a single interface to accept payments from multiple providers through Google Pay - which is especially handy if you’re launching your app internationally. For more details, go to the Firebase Extensions page and install them today! And if you need inspiration to get started, check out the code for our sample app on GitHub that uses over 17 different Extensions and view the deployed version at: https://karas-coffee.web.app/.
These new Extensions, built by our partners in collaboration with Firebase, help you add e-commerce features to your app much faster
We’re excited to announce that Firebase now offers beta level support for tvOS and macOS! This means you can use your favorite Firebase products to build and run apps that are compatible with Apple TVs and Macbooks - from a single codebase - and deliver a great, cross-device experience to users with less hassle. For example, when you add the Crashlytics SDK, you can identify critical crashes and even filter crashes by Apple device type or operating system right from the Firebase Crashlytics console.
With enhanced support for Apple platforms, you can deliver a smooth cross-device experience
If you’re a game developer, you’ll be happy to learn that many of our C++ SDKs now support Apple TV, so you can develop phenomenal Apple Arcade games with Firebase! On top of that, we’re expanding support for game frameworks and engines by making Cloud Firestore available for Unity and C++. This lets you add the power of Cloud Firestore to your game in seconds to store and sync your game data in near real-time, add offline support, and scale your game experience to support thousands of players.
Cloud Firestore is now available for Unity and C++, giving you real-time data synchronization capabilities and offline support
We’ve also made a number of big improvements to Crashlytics’ Unity and NDK SDKs to make it easier to debug your game’s codebase. Now, Crashlytics tracks a wider range of native crash types, and includes IL2CPP support for Unity games to show more symbolicated C++ frames that can be mapped to your C# code.
Finally, with the latest release of Dartpad, Flutter’s online editor, you can use Flutter and Firebase together to develop apps that reach users across platforms with just your browser. Flutter is Google's open source framework for building beautiful, natively compiled, multi-platform apps from a single codebase. It's a natural complement to Firebase's cross-platform backend services. Today, Dartpad supports Cloud Firestore and Firebase Authentication, with other Firebase products coming soon! Go to dartpad.dev and import the Firebase packages to get started. You can also take a look at our sample app.
Dartpad, Flutter’s online editor, now gives you support for Firebase right out of the box
A few months ago, we introduced you to App Check, which provides a powerful layer of security for your backend infrastructure. It does this by attesting that incoming traffic is coming from your app on a legitimate device, and blocking traffic that doesn't have valid credentials. Today, App Check can do even more because we’ve made three major updates.
First, you can now use App Check to protect access to Cloud Firestore (with Firestore Web SDK support coming soon), in addition to Cloud Storage for Firebase, Realtime Database and Cloud Functions for Firebase that we announced previously. Second, we’ve added custom server protections so you can use App Check with any custom backend resources. It even integrates with API Management Platforms like Apigee and CDNs like CloudFlare. Third, we’ve expanded the number of attestation providers App Check supports to now include Apple’s app attestation provider App Attest and reCAPTCHA Enterprise. Register your app with App Check today and start enforcing protections through the Firebase console. To learn more about App Check, check out our documentation.
App Check protects your app and user data
We’re launching detailed documentation that specifies what data each Firebase product collects and shares to help you comply with Google Play’s upcoming safety policies. Our goal is to build upon Google’s commitment to privacy and transparency, and give you a head start to prepare for Google Play’s new data safety section, which launches to app users next year.
The above image is an example only and subject to change
With Firebase, you can monitor your app’s performance and stability, test changes, and get insight on how you can resolve issues to deliver the best experience possible.
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. However, no matter how thoroughly you test your app on your local machine, your app can still run into latency issues because users will access it on different devices, from different countries, and on different network speeds. To keep you informed, we’re releasing a new feature called performance alerts in beta! These new performance alerts will send you an email when your app start time exceeds a given threshold so you can investigate and fix the latency issue as soon as it appears. Performance alerts can be configured from the console and we’ll be adding more alerts for other performance metrics soon.
Performance Monitoring’s new real-time alerts will let you know if your app start time slows down
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. On top of Crashlytics' enhanced support for Apple platforms and game reporting, Crashlytics now reports Application Not Responding (ANRs) errors! According to our research, ANRs account for almost 50% of all unintended application exits on Android, meaning they can be more detrimental to your app’s quality than crashes. To give you a comprehensive view of your app’s stability issues, Crashlytics now reports ANRs and surfaces contextual information about impacted threads so you can pinpoint the cause of the ANR.
Crashlytics now reports Application Not Responding errors, giving you a more comprehensive view of app stability
We’re also unveiling a new concept in Crashlytics called signals. Signals analyze your crashes to uncover interesting commonalities and characteristics that are helpful for troubleshooting. Today, we’re launching with three signals: early crashes, fresh issues, and repetitive issues. Early crashes refer to crashes that users experience near app start. Fresh issues are new issues in the last 7 days, while repetitive issues are issues that users have been encountering over and over again. Signals are available to both Apple and Android app developers. Check them out during your next app release!
Crashlytics signals surface interesting commonalities and characteristics of crashes to improve troubleshooting
As your app grows, Firebase offers the control, automation, and flexibility you need to drive the business outcomes you want, such as increasing engagement and revenue.
Firebase Cloud Messaging makes it easy to send targeted, automated, and customized push notifications across platforms so you can reach users even when they aren’t actively using your app. Firebase In-App Messaging gives you the ability to send contextual messages to users who are actively using your app so you can encourage them to complete key in-app actions. These two products go hand-in-hand in keeping users engaged. That’s why we’re thrilled to reveal a redesigned console experience that brings them together. This unified dashboard gives you a holistic view into all of your messaging campaigns, so you can run sophisticated, multi-touch campaigns for different audiences and see how they perform – from one place. For example, you can send a coupon code to users who are predicted to churn to keep them around because both Cloud Messaging and In-App Messaging work seamlessly with Google Analytics’ new Predictive Audiences. To try the new unified dashboard, visit the console and click the “Preview now” button.
The unified dashboard for Cloud Messaging and In-App Messaging lets you view and manage your campaigns from one place
Another way to retain and delight users is by personalizing the app experience to suit their needs and preferences. With Firebase Remote Config, you can dynamically control and change the way your app looks and behaves without releasing a new version. Today, we’re excited to launch a new Remote Config feature called personalization into beta! Personalization gives you the ability to automatically optimize individual user experiences to maximize the objectives you care about 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.
Halfbrick, the game studio behind titles like Jetpack Joyride, Dan the Man, and the instant-classic Fruit Ninja, has already used personalization to increase revenue by 16% and boost positive app store ratings by 15%! Ahoy Games, another early customer, tried personalization in a number of their games and successfully grew in-app purchases by 12-13% with little to no effort from their team.
Remote Config personalization uses machine learning to help you optimize user experiences to achieve your goals
We’ve also made several core improvements to Remote Config, including updating the parameter edit flow to make it easier to change targeting conditions and default values, and adding data type support to strengthen data validation and reduce the risk of pushing a bad value to your users. Finally, we’ve revamped the change history so you can clearly see when and how parameters were last changed. This will help you understand which app configuration changes correlate to changes in key metrics. Go to the Remote Config console to check out these updates and try personalization today!
Targeting and data validation improvements in Remote Config
From building your app to optimizing it, we are your partner throughout the entire journey. We aim to make app development faster, easier, and streamline your path to success.You can rely on us to help you make your app the best it can be for users and your business. To get more insight into the announcements we shared above, be sure to check out the technical sessions, codelabs, and demos from Firebase Summit! If you want a sneak peek at what we’ll be launching in 2022, join our Alpha program!
The journey of building and releasing an app can sometimes feel like scaling a mountain – both can be filled with hurdles and require a lot of hard work. At Firebase, our goal is to make this journey easier by providing you with tools and resources you need to build and grow apps users love.
That is why every year, we bring the community together at Firebase Summit to share exciting new product updates, answer your burning questions, and provide hands-on training so you can get the most out of our platform. This year won’t be any different, and we are excited to announce that Firebase Summit will be returning as a virtual event on November 10th, 2021 at 9:30am PST. We also have a few exciting activities leading up to Firebase Summit, so read on for what to expect.
Hands-on Learning Experiences
To help you get ready for Firebase Summit, and deepen your knowledge about our products and services, we’ll release a new set of learning pathways every week leading up to the main event. These learning pathways will consist of easy-to-follow codelabs, articles, interactive videos, and quizzes. After completing a pathway, you’ll also have the opportunity to earn a shiny new Google developer badge. The first weekly pathway will launch on October 13th, so check out the event website for more details.
Community Talks
One of the best ways to learn about Firebase is from other developers. On November 3rd, we’ll host community talks where you will get the opportunity to hear from Google Developer Experts on topics like how to build enterprise scale apps with Firebase, implement authorization models, and so much more. Mark your calendars and visit the event website where we’ll highlight these sessions.
Live Keynote, On-demand Technical Sessions, and More
The pathways and community talks lead up to Firebase Summit on November 10th, which will kick off with a jam-packed keynote at 9:30 am PST. Join us to learn how Firebase can help you accelerate app development, run your app with confidence, and scale your business with ease. After the keynote, you can ask questions in the chat and have them answered live by the Firebase team during #AskFirebase. We will also have new on-demand technical sessions on our latest announcements, and demos that you can view at your convenience.
We’ll be sharing more details about Firebase Summit 2021 in the coming weeks so stay tuned. In the meantime, register for the event, subscribe to the Firebase YouTube channel, and follow us on Twitter to join the conversation. #FirebaseSummit
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!
Over the past few months, we’ve seen that apps not only improve the way we live, they also enhance our ability to adapt to change. In 2020, more businesses and families have turned to apps to stay connected, productive, and entertained. At the same time, our developer community has stepped up to build and scale the apps people are relying on. Our team, alongside the rest of Google, has strived to be supportive in this moment. Our mission is to help you succeed by making it easy to build and operate apps.
Last year, we shared that 2 million apps actively use Firebase every month. Now, that number has grown to over 2.5 million monthly active apps, which includes global businesses like Gameloft and Alibaba, as well as innovative startups like Classkick. Classkick is a full-spectrum learning platform with a backend powered by our Realtime Database and supported by Google Cloud. When the COVID-19 pandemic forced schools to close, Classkick onboarded thousands of teachers and school administrators to their platform. With Firebase, they were able to scale to meet this new demand so students could continue to learn effectively from home and stay engaged with their teachers and classmates.
Classkick is helping students learn effectively from home
Classkick is just one example from our incredible community of how apps are helping people adapt to their new surroundings. It’s stories like these that inspire us to keep making Firebase better. Every year at Firebase Summit, we share updates on how we can help you accelerate app development, run your app efficiently, and tailor Firebase to suit your needs. Read on to learn what’s new at our digital Firebase Summit 2020, and view the sessions and resources on our summit website.
We’re continuing to invest in tools that speed up your app development so you can deliver value to your users in less time.
Introducing the Authentication emulator for rapid iteration and local development
Last year, we launched the Firebase Emulator Suite to let you run emulated versions of our backend products for a faster and safer development experience. A few months ago, we introduced you to the local emulator UI, which makes it possible to run services locally via a web app with a distinguishable UI, and comes with features like advanced data editing and searching. The Emulator Suite supports Hosting, Realtime Database, Firestore, Cloud Functions, and Cloud Pub/Sub - and now, we’ve added support for Firebase Authentication.
The Emulator Suite now includes support for Authentication
This means you can test the entire user management process - from user creation to Function trigger to sending updates to Firestore, and even fuzzy log searches to debug interactions between the emulators and your application - on your local machine. You can also use the new auth emulator to run integration tests that rely on authentication. The Emulator Suite, now with Firebase Authentication, allows you to shift to a local-first developer workflow so you can experiment and rapidly iterate without touching production data, incurring costs, or worrying that you’ll break something. Check out our documentation to get started.
New Hosting preview channels let you see changes before publishing
Web development can be cumbersome and complicated. With Firebase Hosting, you can deploy secure, fast-loading web apps and landing pages that are backed by a global CDN in less time, and with less hassle. Recently, we added new features that many of you have been asking for, including an integration with Cloud Logging to give you more server-side analytics, support for Brotli compression to boost your site performance, and improved support for localized content.
Our latest update to Firebase Hosting, preview channels, lets you see your changes before publishing them to your site. Now, you can deploy changes to a preview channel in seconds with a single command and generate an obscured unique URL to share with your team. Preview channels not only let you check that your changes look as intended right away, they also make collaboration quicker and easier even if you’re working across a distributed team. Try them out today!
Hosting’s new preview channels let you see changes before publishing
At last year’s Firebase Summit, we launched Firebase Extensions; pre-packaged solutions that automate common tasks in your projects and let you add new functionality in fewer steps. Since then, we’ve partnered with Stripe to release the Send Invoices using Stripe and the Run Subscription Payments with Stripe extensions. These extensions let you integrate the Stripe payments platform with Firebase without requiring you to learn Stripe’s API.
Today, we’re sharing a preview of another extension through our Alpha Program, called Detect Online Presence. Detect Online Presence shows you which users or devices are currently online and stores that data in Cloud Firestore. If you’re developing a game or a social app, you can use this extension to let your users know when their friends are online for a friendly match or chat. Join our Alpha Program to try it out!
Detect Online Presence is our newest Firebase Extension, available in Alpha
In addition to accelerating app development, Firebase provides actionable data so you can optimize your app - and ultimately, keep users happy.
Redesigned Performance Monitoring dashboard to help you focus on critical metrics
Any time you release a new version of your app, it’s important to pay attention to stability and performance metrics to ensure your users have a fast, high-quality experience. Firebase Performance Monitoring gathers and presents data about your app’s performance to show you exactly what’s happening in your app - and when users are encountering slowness. But sometimes, there’s so much information, it can be hard to focus on what’s important.
To help you hone in on key insights, we’re excited to unveil the redesigned Performance Monitoring dashboard. This new dashboard makes it crystal clear if one of your critical metrics needs attention so that you can take action, and it’s customizable, allowing you to bring the metrics you care about most to the forefront. We’ve made this dashboard available to everyone - just head on over to the console and add the metrics that matter to you.
The redesigned Performance Monitoring dashboard brings critical metrics to the forefront
New organizational and targeting tools for Remote Config
As people start using your app, you’ll want to delight them with new features, promotions, and personalization so they stick around. With Firebase Remote Config, you can dynamically alter your app, safely test and release new features, and stay in control of the whole experience - without having to publish a new version. However, as your project gets bigger, it might become hard to maintain and navigate through your app config. Over the past few months, we’ve added new features to help you better organize, visualize, and target your parameters so you can manage your app config more efficiently.
First, we added information about experiments into the Remote Config dashboard and launched parameter groups. Then, we made it possible to sort parameters alphabetically and enhanced the search tool. On top of that, we improved version targeting by making it available for iOS and adding support for semantic versioning, so you can use numeric operators like “>=” to target specific app versions without resorting to complicated regular expressions.
Improved version targeting in Remote Config
Most recently, we launched config metrics to give you more visibility into how your app configuration is behaving for users so you can find and fix incorrect configurations quickly. These config metrics include realtime fetch requests, which allow you to monitor rollouts of a new set of values, and fetch percentages, which show you the distribution of parameter values across users. For example, when you see a smaller fetch percentage for a condition than expected, it signals that the wrong users may be exposed to the intended values.
Real-time config metrics for Remote Config
When your app and business grow, your development challenges may become more complex. We’re working to give you automation capabilities, such as Crashlytics BigQuery streaming, and more control and flexibility so you can adapt Firebase to fit your sophisticated needs.
New Google Analytics APIs for better data management
One of the key factors in scaling a successful app is knowing how your users are interacting with it. Our robust integration with Google Analytics helps you understand what actions users are taking inside your app, where they're spending their time, and why they churn -- so you can make smarter decisions. Last year, we announced a significant new upgrade in Google Analytics that gave you a single view of customer engagement across both native apps and web-powered ones. Since then, we’ve added new features like the setDefaultEventParameters and powerful new ecommerce measurement, which you can read about in this blog post.
Today, we're excited to announce three new APIs that give you more control so you can collect, record, and manage your data in a way that suits your growing business. The first one, the Google Analytics 4 Measurement Protocol, lets you log events directly to Google Analytics. This is especially useful for developers who want to augment their client-side data with server-to-server calls to gain new insights. For those of you who want to create your own custom dashboards, the Data API, which is the second new API, gives you programmatic access to your Google Analytics reporting data. Finally, the Admin API gives you the ability to configure your Analytics account and set user permissions.
Google Analytics 4 Measurement Protocol lets you log events directly to Google Analytics
Introducing imported segments for increased targeting flexibility
Over the years, we’ve seen many of you take advantage of our BigQuery integration by exporting data from Firebase, joining it with data from other channels, running sophisticated analysis - and even creating your own custom user segments in BigQuery. Now, we’re giving you the power to bring these custom segments back from BigQuery into Firebase with the launch of imported segments! This means you can target any custom segment with products like Remote Config, Cloud Messaging, and In-App Messaging. For example, if you have an ecommerce app and a physical storefront, you can import data from offline sources - like your store - and send those users an in-app promotion with In-App Messaging.
This feature is available through Firebase's BigQuery integration. To get started, simply create your custom segment and import it into your BigQuery dataset. Then, Firebase will be able to read that data and make those segments available for targeting. We built imported segments to give you more control and flexibility to target your users.
New imported segments let you bring custom segments from BigQuery into Firebase
With these improvements to Firebase, we aim to make app development faster and easier so you can stay focused on creating the amazing app experiences that people need to stay productive, connected, and entertained. People are relying on your apps to adapt and thrive in our changing world. You can rely on us to build, operate, and scale successful apps - in 2020 and beyond.
For more resources and content from Firebase Summit 2020, be sure to check out our summit website, and if you’d like a sneak peek of what’s coming next, join our Alpha program.
Keeping your app healthy can be a very time consuming process, even if you’re already using Crashlytics. The bigger your app grows, the more difficult it becomes to keep track of all the crashes your users experience, and which part of your ever growing codebase is causing them. By combining Crashlytics with Google Analytics, all of those previous hurdles become much more manageable, with a supplementary SDK that allows you to reproduce issues and keep track of data with much more granularity. Some of these features include a detailed insight into your crash-free user metrics, the ability to use breadcrumbs to track specific events a user went through before a crash occurred, and the ability to link your apps data to BigQuery to easily visualize your apps key metrics.
Out of the box, Google Analytics keeps count of the number of sessions, and crashes that occur in your Firebase app. This is done through events that the Google Analytics for Firebase SDK tracks automatically--aptly titled “automatically collected events”. By pulling the “session_start” and “app_exception” events, Google Analytics is able to understand when a user session has started and respectively when a crash has occurred. Having those metrics alongside your Crashlytics data gives you a top level view of crashes in your app, as well as the ability to analyze those individual user sessions that led to a crash. This also provides you a dashboard that allows you to quickly notice a dip or a spike in your Crash Free Users, and to check the crash issues right underneath, to figure out what caused it.
Sometimes, you not only need to know where in your code a crash occurred, but exactly what a user was doing in your app before it crashed. As we mentioned earlier, Google Analytics automatically collects several different events in your app, but you also have the ability to log custom events, and custom event parameters. Crashlytics will then add these custom events to individual crash sessions, allowing you to track user sessions with much more granularity. Using these custom event markers alongside Analytics breadcrumbs, you’ll be able to create a trail leading directly to the users crash.
One example you get out of the box is screen view events. This means if you have both Crashlytics and Analytics, you’ll be able to see exactly what screens your user traveled through before they experienced a crash. You can read more about breadcrumbs and Crashlytics here.
Monitoring the stability of your app within your user base is critical for understanding what your areas of focus need to be. This process has been made much simpler with the Latest Release feature. This display will highlight your data once you have both the Google Analytics SDK and Crashlytics SDK integrated, and you will be able to detect crashes in your app’s most recent version, as well as its most popular versions. This view is extremely useful for identifying a prevalent bug that might appear in your app’s latest version that might not present in other versions. Using this tool will allow you to isolate the issue, and solve it much more quickly.
Creating queryable reports on the insights you’ve gathered can be instrumental for your app’s success, among developers and stakeholders alike. Both Crashlytics and Google Analytics offer the ability to export your data into BigQuery and visualize it with Data Studio. You can create complex dashboards that use data from both Analytics and Crashlytics, providing crucial metrics for your business.
By implementing user identifiers or key value pairs into your crash reports, and exporting them alongside your Google Analytics custom events, you can start tying your Crashlytics and Google Analytics data together in order to better understand how stability is affecting your users and your revenue. For example, if you’re a game developer and your users are only getting to the first level of your game before they reach a fatal error, this could be causing a lot of churn. You could figure that out by querying for most pervasive crashes in your app by user ID, and then filtering by your first level custom event.
Picking up on trends such as which crashes are causing your users the most grief in a given week, or figuring out which demographic of users those problematic crashes are affecting, are just a couple of the useful features that exporting your Crashlytic and Google Analytics data to BigQuery will provide you. Here are a handful of useful queries you can try out for yourself!
No party is complete without pizza, and no Firebase Crashlytics integration is complete without Google Analytics. So, whether you’re looking to keep track of your app’s latest version, break down your user data in BigQuery, or just need a robust app development platform, head over to the Firebase console and integrate your app with Crashlytics and Google Analytics!
It’s been a year since we all came together in Madrid, Spain for Firebase Summit 2019, shared announcements and updates, and listened to your product feedback. Since then the world as we know it has changed, but here at Firebase our mission to help developers succeed by making it easy to build and operate mobile and web apps remains the same.
We’ve been working hard to build tools to help you accelerate app development, gain actionable insights and scale with ease. We’re looking forward to sharing these updates with you at this year’s virtual Firebase Summit, happening 27-28 October at 9:30AM PST each day. All you have to do is prop up your mobile device or laptop, head over to firebase.google.com/summit, and tune in from wherever you’d like.
While we will miss connecting with you in person, we are excited that even more developers can join us this year.
Here’s what to expect during the two days:
Join us 27 October at 9:30 am PST for the opening keynote to learn how Firebase can help you build and operate your apps. After the keynote, you can ask questions in the chat and have them answered live by the Firebase team during #AskFirebase.
Stay tuned for 11 technical sessions on topics like monitoring your latest release, increasing user engagement, optimizing your app revenue, and more. These sessions will be live streamed over the two days so you can watch and chat with other developers and the Firebase team, or you can watch them on-demand at your convenience.
For a more hands-on learning experience, watch us live code an app from scratch using Flutter and Firebase. You can also try one of our new demos, codelabs with walkthrough videos and multi-step tracks to learn about popular topics such as how to build a web app using Firebase.
We will be releasing more details about Firebase Summit in the coming weeks. In the meantime, sign up for updates on our event page, subscribe to the Firebase YouTube channel, and follow us on Twitter to join the conversation.
