Originally posted on the Firebase Blog by Francis Ma, Firebase Group Product Manager
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.
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We're thrilled by the initial response from the community, but we believe our
journey is just getting started. Let's talk about some of the enhancements
coming to Firebase today.
Integrating with Fabric
In January, we
announced that we were welcoming the Fabric team to Firebase. Fabric initially
grabbed our attention with their array of products, including the
industry-leading crash reporting tool, Crashlytics. As we got to know the team
better, we were even more impressed by how closely aligned our missions are: to
help developers build better apps and grow successful businesses. Over the last
several months, we've been working closely with the Fabric team to bring
the best of our platforms together .
We plan to make Crashlytics the primary crash reporting product in Firebase. If
you don't already use a crash reporting tool, we recommend you take a look at
Crashlytics and see what it can do for you. You can get started by following the Fabric
documentation .
Phone authentication comes to Firebase
Phone number authentication has been the biggest request for Firebase
Authentication, so we're excited to announce that we've worked with the Fabric
Digits team to bring phone auth to our platform. You can now let your users sign
in with their phone numbers, in addition to traditional email/password or
identity providers like Google or Facebook. This gives you a comprehensive
authentication solution no matter who your users are or how they like to log in.
At the same time, the Fabric team will be retiring the Digits name and SDK. If
you currently use Digits, over the next couple weeks we'll be rolling out the
ability to link your existing Digits account with Firebase and swap in the
Firebase SDK for the Digits SDK. Go to the Digits
blog to learn more.
Introducing Firebase Performance Monitoring
We recognize that poor app performance and stability are the top reasons for
users to leave bad ratings on your app and possibly churn altogether. As part of
our effort to help you build better apps, we're pleased to announce the beta
launch of Performance Monitoring.
Firebase Performance Monitoring is a new free tool that helps you understand
when your user experience is being impacted by poorly performing code or
challenging network conditions. You can learn more and get started with
Performance Monitoring in the Firebase
documentation .
More robust analytics
Analytics has been core to the Firebase platform since we launched last I/O. We
know that understanding your users is the number one way to make your app
successful, so we're continuing to invest in improving our analytics product.
First off, you may notice that you're starting to see the name "Google Analytics
for Firebase" around our documentation. Our analytics solution was built in
conjunction with the Google Analytics team, and the reports are available both
in the Firebase console and the Google Analytics interface. So, we're renaming
Firebase Analytics to Google Analytics for Firebase, to reflect that your app
analytics data are shared across both.
For those of you who monetize your app with AdMob , we've started sharing data between
the two platforms , helping you understand the true lifetime value (LTV) of
your users, from both purchases and AdMob revenue. You'll see these new insights
surfaced in the updated Analytics dashboard.
Many of you have also asked for analytics insights into custom events and
parameters. Starting today, you can register up to 50 custom event parameters
and see their details in your Analytics reports. Learn more about
custom parameter reporting .
Firebase for all - iOS, games, and open source
Firebase's mission is to help all developers build better apps. In that spirit,
today we're announcing expanded platform and vertical support for Firebase.
First of all, as Swift has become the preferred language for many iOS
developers, we've updated our SDK to handle Swift language nuances, making Swift
development a native experience on Firebase.
We've also improved Firebase Cloud Messaging by adding support for token-based
authentication for APNs, and greatly simplifying the connection and registration
logic in the client SDK.
Second, we've heard from our game developer community that one of the most
important stats you monitor is frames per second (FPS). So, we've built Game
Loop support & FPS monitoring into Test Lab for Android, allowing you to
evaluate your game's frame rate before you deploy. Coupled with the addition of
Unity plugins and a C++ SDK, which we
announced at GDC this year, we think that Firebase is a great option for
game developers. To see an example of a game built on top of Firebase, check out
our Mecha Hamster app on
Github .
Finally, we've taken a big first step towards open sourcing our SDKs. We believe
in open source software, not only because transparency is an important goal, but
also because we know that the greatest innovation happens when we all
collaborate. You can view our new repos on our open sourceproject page and learn more about our decision in this
blog post .
Dynamic Hosting with Cloud Functions for Firebase
In March, we
launched Cloud Functions for Firebase , which lets you run custom backend
code in response to events triggered by Firebase features and HTTP requests.
This lets you do things like send a notification when a user signs up or
automatically create thumbnails when an image is uploaded to Cloud Storage.
Today, in an effort to better serve our web developer community, we're expanding
Firebase Hosting to integrate with Cloud Functions. This means that, in addition
to serving static assets for your web app, you can now serve dynamic content,
generated by Cloud Functions, through Firebase Hosting. For those of you
building progressive web
apps , Firebase Hosting + Cloud Functions allows you to go completely
server-less. You can learn more by visiting our
documentation .
Firebase Alpha program and what's next
Our goal is to build the best developer experience: easy-to-use products, great
documentation, and intuitive APIs. And the best resource that we have for
improving Firebase is you! Your questions and feedback continuously push us to
make Firebase better.
In light of that, we're excited to announce a Firebase Alpha program, where you
will have the opportunity to test the cutting edge of our products. Things might
not be perfect (in fact, we can almost guarantee they won't be), but by
participating in the alpha community, you'll help define the future of Firebase.
If you want to get involved, please register your interest in the Firebase Alpha form .
Thank you for your support, enthusiasm, and, most importantly, feedback. The
Firebase community is the reason that we've been able to grow and improve our
platform at such an incredible pace over the last year. We're excited to
continue working with you to build simple, intuitive products for developing
apps and growing mobile businesses. To get started with Firebase today, visit
our newly redesigned website . We're
excited to see what you build!
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