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.
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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.
Our team is driven by the belief that apps have drastically improved the way we live, work, learn, and socialize, keeping us connected to each other and plugged into the information we need. Now more than ever, we understand the importance of supporting our developer community by ensuring you have the technology and resources you need to keep your business up and running. Whether you’re a high-growth startup or a global enterprise, we’re still here to help you build and operate your app.
