With the announced expansion of Firebase at Google I/O recently, we also introduced Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) and Firebase Notifications (FN). As a developer, there are lots of updates that you might be able to take advantage of.
Despite the switch to FCM, we’ll continue to support Google Cloud Messaging on Android, iOS and the Web because we know that you have applications using the previous SDKs to handle notifications. However, all new client side features will be added to FCM SDKs moving forward. As such, we strongly recommend that you upgrade to the FCM SDKs. You can learn more about them here.
FCM supports everything that you’ve come to know with Google Cloud Messaging including addressing single devices, groups of devices or topics.
The FCM SDK simplifies client development. For example, you no longer need to write your own registration or subscription retry logic. When it comes to your server (if you still want to use one), updates to the endpoints and protocol don’t incur breaking changes, so as to maintain backwards compatibility. The updated details are available in the FCM Server documentation.
We’re investing heavily in making Firebase our unified mobile platform. We’re also continuing to expand our messaging platform beyond Android, including iOS and the Web. Firebase is well known for it’s cross-platform capabilities, so FCM is a natural fit for the ongoing Firebase releases. If you want to learn how to migrate your current app from Google Cloud Messaging to FCM, we’ve provided guides here for Android and iOS.
We think that Google Cloud Messaging will be even more useful to you when integrated into Firebase, including the new Firebase Notifications console. With that you’ll be able to send messages to apps directly from the console -- without you needing to build a messaging server.
To upgrade from Google Cloud Messaging to FCM or to learn more, see our guides for Android and iOS apps.
Posted by Fabian Schlup, Software Engineer
Two weeks ago, over 7,000 developers descended upon Mountain View for this year’s Google I/O, with a takeaway that it’s truly an exciting time for Search. People come to Google billions of times per day to fulfill their daily information needs. We’re focused on creating features and tools that we believe will help users and publishers make the most of Search in today’s world. As Google continues to evolve and expand to new interfaces, such as the Google assistant and Google Home, we want to make it easy for publishers to integrate and grow with Google.
In case you didn’t have a chance to attend all our sessions, we put together a recap of all the Search happenings at I/O.
1: Introducing rich cards
We announced rich cards, a new Search result format building on rich snippets, that uses schema.org markup to display content in an even more engaging and visual format. Rich cards are available in English for recipes and movies and we’re excited to roll out for more content categories soon. To learn more, browse the new gallery with screenshots and code samples of each markup type or watch our rich cards devByte.
2: New Search Console reports
We want to make it easy for webmasters and developers to track and measure their performance in search results. We launched a new report in Search Console to help developers confirm that their rich card markup is valid. In the report we highlight “enhanceable cards,” which are cards that can benefit from marking up more fields. The new Search Appearance filter also makes it easy for webmasters to filter their traffic by AMP and rich cards.
3: Real-time indexing
Users are searching for more than recipes and movies: they’re often coming to Search to find fresh information about what’s happening right now. This insight kickstarted our efforts to use real-time indexing to connect users searching for real-time events with fresh content. Instead of waiting for content to be crawled and indexed, publishers will be able to use the Google Indexing API to trigger the indexing of their content in real time. It’s still in its early days, but we’re excited to launch a pilot later this summer.
3: Getting up to speed with Accelerated Mobile Pages
We provided an update on our use of AMP, an open source effort to speed up the mobile web. Google Search uses AMP to enable instant-loading content. Speed is important---over 40% of users abandon a page that takes more than three seconds to load. We announced that we’re bringing AMPed news carousels to the iOS and Android Google apps, as well as experimenting with combining AMP and rich cards. Stay tuned for more via our blog and github page.
In addition to the sessions, attendees could talk directly with Googlers at the Search & AMP sandbox.
5: A new and improved Structured Data Testing Tool
We updated the popular Structured Data Testing tool. The tool is now tightly integrated with the DevSite Search Gallery and the new Search Preview service, which lets you preview how your rich cards will look on the search results page.
6: App Indexing got a new home (and new features)
We announced App Indexing’s migration to Firebase, Google’s unified developer platform. Watch the session to learn how to grow your app with Firebase App Indexing.
7: App streaming
App streaming is a new way for Android users to try out games without having to download and install the app -- and it’s already available in Google Search. Check out the session to learn more.
8. Revamped documentation
We also revamped our developer documentation, organizing our docs around topical guides to make it easier to follow.
Thanks to all who came to I/O -- it’s always great to talk directly with developers and hear about experiences first-hand. And whether you came in person or tuned in from afar, let’s continue the conversation on the webmaster forum or during our office hours, hosted weekly via hangouts-on-air.
Posted by Jason Guo, Developer Programs Engineer, Project Tango
Project Tango brings augmented reality (AR) experiences to life. From the practical to the whimsical, Project Tango apps help place virtual objects -- anything from new living room furniture to a full-sized dinosaur -- into your physical world.
Last month we showed you how to quickly and easily make a simple solar system in AR. But if you are ready for something more advanced, the tutorial below describes how to use Project Tango’s depth APIs to associate virtual objects with real world objects. It also shows you how to use a Tango Support Library function to find the planar surface in an environment.
So what’s our new tutorial project? We figured that since cats rule the Internet, we’d place a virtual cat in AR! The developer experience is designed to be simple -- when you tap on the screen, the app creates a virtual cat based on real-world geometry. You then use the depth camera to locate the surface you tapped on, and register (place) the cat in the right 3D position.
Bring on the cats!
Before you start, you’ll need to download the Project Tango Unity SDK. Then you can follow the steps below to create your own cats.
Step 1: Create a new Unity project and import the Tango SDK package into the project.
Step 2: Create a new scene. If you don’t know how to do this, look back at the solar system tutorial. Just like the solar system project, you’ll use the Tango Manager and Tango AR Camera in the scene and remove the default Main Camera gameobject. After doing this, you should see the scene hierarchy like this:
Step 3: Build and run once, making sure sure the application shows the video feed from Tango’s camera.
Step 4: Enable the Depth checkbox on the Tango Manager gameobject.
Step 5: Drag and drop the Tango Point Cloud prefab to the scene from the TangoPrefab folder.
Tango Point Cloud includes a bunch of useful functions related to point cloud, including finding the floor, transforming pointcloud to unity global space, and rendering debug points. In this case, you’ll use the FindPlane function to find a plane based on the touch event.
Step 6: Create a UI Controller gameobject in the scene. To do this, click the “Create” button under the Hierarchy tab, then click “Create Empty.” The UI Controller will be the hosting gameobject to run your UIController.cs script (which you’ll create in the next step).
Step 7: Click on “UIController gameobject” in the inspector window, then click “Add Component” to add a C# script named KittyUIController.cs. KittyUIController.cs will handle the touch event, call the FindPlane function, and place your kitty into the scene.
Step 8: Double click on the KittyUIController.cs file and replace the script with the following code
using UnityEngine; using System.Collections; public class KittyUIController : MonoBehaviour { public GameObject m_kitten; private TangoPointCloud m_pointCloud; void Start() { m_pointCloud = FindObjectOfType(); } void Update () { if (Input.touchCount == 1) { // Trigger place kitten function when single touch ended. Touch t = Input.GetTouch(0); if (t.phase == TouchPhase.Ended) { PlaceKitten(t.position); } } } void PlaceKitten(Vector2 touchPosition) { // Find the plane. Camera cam = Camera.main; Vector3 planeCenter; Plane plane; if (!m_pointCloud.FindPlane(cam, touchPosition, out planeCenter, out plane)) { Debug.Log("cannot find plane."); return; } // Place kitten on the surface, and make it always face the camera. if (Vector3.Angle(plane.normal, Vector3.up) < 30.0f) { Vector3 up = plane.normal; Vector3 right = Vector3.Cross(plane.normal, cam.transform.forward).normalized; Vector3 forward = Vector3.Cross(right, plane.normal).normalized; Instantiate(m_kitten, planeCenter, Quaternion.LookRotation(forward, up)); } else { Debug.Log("surface is too steep for kitten to stand on."); } } }
m_kitten
m_pointCloud
TangoPointCloud
FindPlane
Start()
Update()
PlaceKitten(Vector2 touchPosition)
KittyUIController
Posted by Laurence Moroney, Developer Advocate
If you’ve ever used any of the Google Maps or Geo APIs, you’ll likely have watched a video, read a doc, or explored some code written by Ankur Kotwal. We sat down with him to discuss his experience with these APIs, from the past, to the present and through to the future. We discuss how to get started in building mapping apps, and how to consume many of Google’s web services that support them.
We also discuss the Santa Tracker application, that Ankur was instrumental in delivering, including some fun behind the scenes stories of the hardes project manager he’s ever worked with!
Posted by Mike Procopio, Engineering Manager, Google Drive and Wesley Chun, Developer Advocate, Google Apps
WhatsApp is one of the most popular mobile apps in the world. Over a billion users send and receive over 42 billion messages, photos, and videos every day. It's fast, easy to use, and reliable.
But what happens when people lose their phone or otherwise upgrade to a new one? All those messages and memories would be gone. So we worked with WhatsApp to give their users the ability to back up their data to Google Drive and restore it when they setup WhatsApp on a new phone. With messages and media safely stored in your Drive, there’s no more worry about losing any of those memories.
One of the biggest challenges for an integration of this scope is scaling. How do you back up data for a billion users? Many things were done to ensure the feature works as intended and is unnoticeable by users. Our approach? First, we relied on a proven infrastructure that can handle this kind of volume—Google Drive. Next, we optimized what to back up and when to do the backups—the key was to upload only incremental changes rather than transmit identical files.
On the server side (backend), we focused on optimizing byte storage as well as the number of network calls between WhatsApp and Google. As far as deployment goes, we rolled out slowly over several months to minimize the size and impact of deployment.
If you have ever used WhatsApp, you know how it gets out of your way, and lets you get started quickly: no account creation, no passwords to manage, and no user IDs to remember or exchange. This sets a high bar for any integration with WhatsApp: for it to feel like a natural part of WhatsApp, it has to be as seamless, fast, and reliable as WhatsApp itself.
By using the Google Drive API, we were able to achieve this: no need to type in any usernames or passwords, just a few taps in the app, and WhatsApp starts backing up. The best part is that all the tools used in the integration are available to all developers. With the Google Drive API, seamless and scalable integrations are as easy to use for the user as they are for developers.
To learn more about how we did it and get all the details, check out the complete talk we gave together with WhatsApp at Google I/O 2016.
Are you ready to integrate your web and mobile apps with Google Drive? Get started today by checking out our intro video as well as the video demoing the newest API, then dig in with the developer docs found at developers.google.com/drive. We're excited to see what you build next with the Drive API—and we're ready to scale with you!
Originally posted on Google Chromium Blog
Originally posted on Google for Education blog
Posted by Ed Kupershlak, Google Classroom Software Engineer
Last year, we launched the Classroom API to make it easier for administrators to manage classes, and for developers to integrate their applications with Classroom. Since that time, hundreds of applications have integrated with Classroom to help teachers gamify their classes, improve students’ writing skills, build interactive presentations and more.
Do more with coursework in the Classroom API
Today, we’re introducing new coursework endpoints that allow developers to access assignments, grades and workflow. Learning tools can focus on creating great content and, in turn, use Classroom to manage the workflow for assignments created with this content. Gradebooks and reporting systems can now also sync grades with Classroom, eliminating the need for teachers to manually transfer grades.
Several partners have been helping to test the new functionality, including:
Access course Drive folders, groups and materials
In addition to the coursework endpoints, we’ve added new functionality to our existing course and roster API endpoints. Developers can now access course Drive folders, groups and materials. Applications can use this new functionality to store files in the same Drive folder as the rest of the resources in a class, or use course groups to manage file sharing permissions.
In the coming months, we’ll be adding more coursework management capabilities. When we do, we’ll post updates to the developer forum and issue tracker. We look forward to working together to make it even easier for teachers and students to use the tools they love with Classroom. Developers, please review the documentation, the FAQ, and ask questions on Stack Overflow. Also, don’t forget to let us know what you’re building using the #withClassroom hashtag on Twitter or G+. And teachers, check out this list of applications that work well with Classroom today.
Posted by Andrey Doronichev, Group Product Manager, Google VR
In Daydream Labs, the Google VR team explores virtual reality’s possibilities and shares what we learn with the world. While it’s still early days, the VR community has already come a long way in understanding what works well in VR across hardware, software, video, and much more. But, part of what makes developing for VR so exciting is that there’s still so much more to discover.
Apps are a big focus for Daydream Labs. In the past year, we’ve built more than 60 app experiments that test different use cases and interaction designs. To learn fast, we build two new app prototypes each week. Not all of our experiments are successful, but we learn something new with each one.
For example, in one week we built a virtual drum kit that used HTC Vive controllers as drumsticks. The following week, when we were debating how to make typing in VR more natural and playful, we thought — “what if we made a keyboard out of tiny drums?”
We were initially skeptical that drumsticks could be more efficient than direct hand interaction, but the result surprised us. Not only was typing with drumsticks faster than with a laser pointer, it was really fun! We even built a game that lets you track your words per minute (mine was 50 wpm!).
Daydream Labs is just getting started. This post is the first in an ongoing series sharing what we’ve learned through our experiments so stay tuned for more! You can also see more of what we’ve learned about VR interactions, immersion, and social design by watching our Google I/O talks on the live stream.
Posted by Nathan Martz, Product Manager, Daydream
Two years ago at Google I/O, we introduced Google Cardboard, a simple and fun way to experience virtual reality on your smartphone. Since then, we've grown the Google VR family with Expeditions and Jump, and this week at Google I/O, we announced Daydream, a platform for high quality mobile virtual reality.
We announced Jump, cameras and software to make producing beautiful VR video simple, at I/O last year. Jump cameras are now in the hands of media partners such as Paramount Pictures, The New York Times, and Discovery Communications. Virtual reality production companies including WEVR, Vrse, The Secret Location, Surreal, Specular Theory, Panograma, and RYOT also have cameras in hand. We can't wait to see the wide variety of immersive videos these creators will share with a growing VR audience.
To enable cameras in a range of shapes and sizes and price points. Today, the Jump ecosystem expands with two partnerships to build Jump cameras. First, we're working with Yi Technology on a rig based around their new 4K Action Cam, coming later this year.
With Jump, we've also seen incredible interest from filmmakers. Of course when you're creating the best content you want the absolute highest quality, cinema-grade camera available. To help create this, we're collaborating with IMAX to develop a very high-end cinema-grade Jump camera.
More than one million students from over 11 countries have taken an Expedition since we introduced the Google Expeditions Pioneer Program last May. The program lets students take virtual reality trips to over 200 places including Buckingham Palace, underwater in the Great Barrier Reef—and in seventh grader Lance Teeselink’s case—Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world.
And soon, students will have even more places to visit, virtually, thanks to new partnerships with the Associated Press and Getty Images. These partners will provide the Expeditions program with high-resolution VR imagery for current events to help students better understand what’s happening around the world.
Daydream is our new platform for high quality mobile virtual reality, coming this fall. Over time, Daydream will encompass VR devices in many shapes and sizes, and Daydream will enable high quality VR on Android smartphones.
We are working with a number of smartphone manufacturers to create a specification for Daydream-ready phones. These smartphones enable VR experiences with high-performance sensors for smooth, accurate head tracking, fast response displays to minimize blur, and powerful mobile processors. Daydream-ready phones take advantage of VR mode in Android N, a set of powerful optimizations for virtual reality built right into Android.
With Daydream, we've also created a reference design for a comfortable headset and an intuitive controller. And, yes we're building one too. The headset and controller work in tandem to provide rich, immersive experiences. Take a look at how the controller lets you interact in VR:
The most important part of virtual reality is what you experience. Some of the world's best content creators and game studios are bringing their content to Daydream. You will also have your favorite Google apps including Play Movies, Street View, Google Photos, and YouTube.
You can start building for Daydream today. The Google VR SDK now includes a C++ NDK. And if you develop with Unreal or Unity, Daydream will be natively supported by both engines. Visit the Daydream developer site where you can get access the tools. Plus, with Android N Developer Preview 3 you can use the Nexus 6P as a Daydream developer kit.
This is just the beginning for Daydream. We’ll be sharing much more on this blog over the coming months. We’re excited to build the next chapter of VR with you.
Originally posted on Google Apps Developers Blog
Posted by Tom Holman, Product Manager, Google Sheets
There was a time when office work used to be all about pushing physical paper. Computing and productivity tools have made things better, but workers still find themselves doing the same tasks over and over across the different apps they use: copying and pasting from a CRM app to a slide presentation, or manually exporting data from a project management app just to turn around and import it back into a spreadsheet. It’s the digital equivalent of pushing paper.
To make it easier to get the job done across multiple apps, without all the copy and paste, we’re announcing three new APIs and a new feature to help workers get to the data they need, when and where they need it.
Build seamless integrations with the new Sheets and Slides APIs
Our new APIs let developers connect their apps—and the data within them—more deeply with Google Sheets and Google Slides.
The new Sheets API gives developers programmatic access to powerful features in the Sheets web and mobile interfaces, including charts and pivot tables. For example, developers can use Sheets as part of a rich workflow that pushes data from their app into Sheets and allows users to collaborate on that data before the updated data is pulled back into the original app, removing altogether the need to copy and paste.
Teams at Anaplan, Asana, Sage, Salesforce, and SAP Anywhere are already building interesting integrations with the new Sheets API. Check out the video below to see an overview of what’s possible as well as several example integrations.
Partner integrations with the new Google Sheets API
The new Sheets API is available today. Find the developer documentation as well as a codelab to help you get started at developers.google.com/sheets.
Similar to the Sheets API, the new Slides API gives developers programmatic access to create and update presentations. For example, developers can use this API to push data and charts into Slides to create a polished report from source data in other application, ready to present.
Conga, ProsperWorks, SalesforceIQ and Trello are all building integrations with Slides using the new API. Several examples of what’s possible are in the video below.
Partner integrations with the new Google Slides API
The Slides API will be launching in the coming months, and these partner integrations will be available soon after. You can sign up for early access to the Slides API at developers.google.com/slides.
Keep your data in sync with the new Classroom API
For developers building tools and workflows for schools, the Classroom API has launched new coursework endpoints to help you build stronger integrations that keep your data in sync. Read the full announcement on the Google for Education blog, here.
Sync assignments & grades programmatically with the Google Classroom API
Say goodbye to stale data with linked charts
Finally, to make sure we can help keep all this data flowing seamlessly from app to app, users can now also embed linked charts from Sheets into Docs or Slides. The result? Once the underlying data in a spreadsheet changes, whether that change comes from an action taken in another app via the API or a collaborator, an updated chart in the corresponding presentation or document is just one click away.
Linked charts allow for easy updates in Docs & Slides
For more information, see how to add a chart to a document or to a presentation.
We can't wait to see what you build.
By Jason Titus, Vice President, Developer Product Group
Earlier today, we kicked off our 10-year celebration of hosting developer events with Google I/O in front of over 7,000 developers at Shoreline Amphitheatre, and with millions of other viewers on the I/O live stream around the world. During the keynote, we had a number of announcements that featured tools for Android, iOS, and mobile Web developers, showcased the power of machine learning for delivering better user experiences, and introduced a previewed platform for high quality, mobile virtual reality.
And over the next three days at the festival, we’ll continue to focus on things that matter to you: Develop, to build high quality apps; Grow & Earn, to find high quality users, increase user engagement and create successful businesses; and What’s Next, a look at new platforms for future growth.
Those core themes are best represented in our launch of Firebase. As shared during the keynote, we’ve significantly expanded Firebase beyond a mobile backend to include brand new features, like mobile analytics, growth tools, and crash reporting. Firebase is now a suite of 15 features and integrations designed to help you develop your app, grow a user base and earn money. At the heart of the suite is a new mobile analytics tool we built from the ground up called Firebase Analytics. Available for free and unlimited usage, Firebase Analytics is inspired by our decade-long experience running Google Analytics, but designed specifically for the unique needs of apps.
Let's also take a closer look at the other major developer news at I/O:
Eighteen months ago, Firebase joined Google. Since then, our backend-as-a-service (BaaS) that handles the heavy lifting of building an app has grown from a passionate community of 110,000 developers to over 450,000.
Our current features -- Realtime Database, User Authentication, and Hosting -- make app development easier, but there’s more we can do, so today, we’re announcing a major expansion!
Firebase is expanding to become a unified app platform for Android, iOS and mobile web development. We’re adding new tools to help you develop faster, improve app quality, acquire and engage users, and monetize apps. On top of this, we’re launching a brand new analytics product that ties everything together, all while staying true to the guiding principles we’ve had from the beginning:
Firebase Analytics is our brand new, free and unlimited analytics solution for mobile apps. It benefits from Google’s experience with Google Analytics, but differs in a few important ways:
First, Firebase Analytics is user and event-centric. Instead of focusing on pageviews, screenviews, and sessions, it gives you insight into what your users are doing in your app. You can also see how your paid advertising campaigns are performing with cross-network attribution, which tells you where your users are coming from. You can see all of this from a single dashboard.
Second, Firebase Analytics is integrated with other Firebase offerings to provide a single source of truth for in-app activity and through a feature called Audiences. Audiences let you define groups of users with common attributes. Once defined, these groups can be accessed from other Firebase features -- to illustrate, we’ll reference Audiences throughout this post.
To help you build better apps, our suite of backend services is expanding.
Google Cloud Messaging, the most popular cloud-to-device push messaging service in the world, is integrating with Firebase and changing its name to Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM). Available for free and for unlimited usage, FCM supports messaging on iOS, Android, and the Web, and is heavily optimized for reliability and battery-efficiency. It’s built for scale and already sends 170 billion messages per day to two billion devices.
One of our most requested features is the ability to store images, videos, and other large files. We’re launching Firebase Storage so developers can easily and securely upload and download such files. Firebase Storage is powered by Google Cloud Storage, giving it massive scalability and allowing stored files to be easily accessed by Google Cloud projects. The Firebase Storage client SDKs have advanced logic to gracefully handle poor network conditions.
Firebase Remote Config gives you instantly-updatable variables that you can use to tune and customize your app on the fly to deliver the best experience to your users. You can enable or disable features or change the look and feel without having to publish a new version. You can also target configurations to specific Firebase Analytics Audiences so that each of your users has an experience that’s tailored for them.
In addition, we’re continuing to invest heavily in our existing backend products, Firebase Realtime Database, Firebase Hosting, and Firebase Authentication. Authentication has seen the biggest updates, with brand new SDKs, and an upgraded backend infrastructure. This provides added security, reliability, and scale using the same technologies that power Google’s own accounts. We’ve also added new Authentication features including email verification and account linking. For Hosting, custom domain support is now free for all developers, and the Database has a completely rebuilt UI. We’re working hard on other great Realtime Database features, stay tuned for those.
We’re adding two new offerings to Firebase to help you deliver higher quality apps.
When your app crashes, it’s bad for your users and it hurts your business. Firebase Crash Reporting gives you prioritized, actionable reports to help you diagnose and fix problems in your iOS or Android app after it has shipped. We’ve also connected Crash Reporting to Audiences in Firebase Analytics, so you can tell if users on a particular device, in a specific geography, or in any other custom segment are experiencing elevated crash rates.
Cloud Test Lab, announced last year at Google I/O, is now Firebase Test Lab for Android. Test Lab helps you find problems in your app before your users do. It allows for both automatic and customized testing of your app on real devices hosted in Google data centers.
After you’ve launched your app, we can help you grow and re-engage users with five powerful growth features.
Firebase Notifications is a new UI built on top of the Firebase Cloud Messaging APIs that lets you easily deliver notifications to your users without writing a line of code. Using the Notifications console you can re-engage users, run marketing campaigns, and target messages to Audiences in Firebase Analytics.
Firebase Dynamic Links make URLs more powerful in two ways. First, they provide “durability” -- links persist across the app install process so users are taken to the right place when they first open your app. This “warm welcome” increases engagement and retention. Second, they allow for dynamically changing the destination of a link based on run-time conditions, such as the type of browser or device. Use them in web, email, social media, and physical promotions to gain insight into your growth channels.
Firebase Invites turns your customers into advocates. Your users can easily share referral codes or their favorite content via SMS or email to their network, so you can increase your app's reach and retention.
Firebase App Indexing, formerly Google App Indexing, brings new and existing users to your app from the billions of Google searches. If your app is already installed, users can launch it directly from the search results. New users are presented with a link to install your app.
AdWords, Google’s advertising platform for user acquisition and engagement, is now integrated with Firebase. Firebase can track your AdWords app installs and report lifetime value to the Firebase Analytics dashboard. Firebase Audiences can be used in AdWords to re-engage specific groups of users. In-app events can be defined as conversions in AdWords, to automatically optimize your ads, including universal app campaigns.
To help you generate revenue from your app and build a sustainable business, we’ve integrated Firebase with AdMob, an advertising platform used by more than 1 million apps. We’ve made it easier to get started with AdMob when you integrate the Firebase SDK into your app. Using AdMob, you can choose from the latest ad formats, including native ads, which help provide a great user experience.
Along with new feature launches, we’re moving our website and documentation to a new home: firebase.google.com.
We’re also launching a brand new console to manage your app. It is completely redesigned and rebuilt for improved ease of use, and we’ve deeply integrated it with other Google offerings, like Google Cloud and Google Play.
Firebase now uses the same underlying account system as Google Cloud Platform, which means you can use Cloud products with your Firebase app. For example, a feature of Firebase Analytics is the ability to export your raw analytics data to BigQuery for advanced querying. We’ll continue to weave together Cloud and Firebase, giving you the functionality of a full public cloud as you grow.
You can also link your Firebase account to Google Play from our new console. This allows data, like in-app purchases, to flow to Firebase Analytics, and ANRs (application not responding) to flow to Firebase Crash Reporting, giving you one place to check the status of your app.
Finally, we’re announcing the beta launch of a new C++ SDK. You can find the documentation and getting started guides here.
We’re excited to announce that most of these new products, including Analytics, Crash Reporting, Remote Config, and Dynamic Links, are free for unlimited usage.
For our four paid products: Test Lab, Storage, Realtime Database, and Hosting, we’re announcing simpler pricing. We now offer:
Many things are changing, but Firebase’s core principles remain the same. We care deeply about providing a great developer experience through easy-to-use APIs, intuitive interfaces, comprehensive documentation, and tight integrations. We’re committed to cross-platform development for iOS, Android, and the Web, and when you run into trouble, we’ll provide support to help you succeed.
If you were using a Firebase feature before today -- like the Realtime Database, GCM, or App Indexing -- there’s no impact on your app. We’ll continue to support you, though we recommend upgrading to the latest SDK to access our new features.
As far as we’ve come, this is still early days. We’ll continue to refine and add to Firebase. For example, the JavaScript SDK does not yet support all the new features. We’re working quickly to close gaps, and we’d love to hear your feedback so we can improve. You can help by requesting a feature.
All the new features are ready-to-go, and already in use by apps like Shazam, SkyScanner, PicCollage, and more. Get started today by signing up, visiting our new site, or reading the documentation to learn more.
We can’t wait to hear what you think!
