New Firebase launches at Google I/O!

[James Tamplin]

Hi Firebasers -

 

Here are the exciting new features/announcements from today at Google I/O!

 

Fabric Integration - In January, we announced that Fabric was joining us. We’ve been working closely to integrate the two platforms. In the future, we plan to make Crashlytics our primary crash reporting product.

 

Phone Number Authentication - Letting users login to your apps with just their phone number has been the biggest feature request for Firebase Authentication. Fabric has a solution, called Digits, and we’ve been working with them to bring phone auth to Firebase, starting today. You can get started here.

 

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.

 

Firebase Performance Monitoring - Firebase Performance Monitoring is a new free product for iOS & Android, launching in beta today, 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 here.

 

Dynamic Hosting - 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. To better serve our web developers, 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. Get started here.

 

Analytics - We have several new features!

• New branding - Firebase Analytics was built in conjunction with the Google Analytics team, and it's available both in the Firebase console and the Google Analytics interface. So, we’re renaming the product to Google Analytics for Firebase, to reflect that your app analytics data are shared across both.

• AdMob data sharing - If you monetize 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.

• Higher limits on custom parameters - Starting today, you can register up to 50 custom event parameters and see details in your Analytics reports. Learn more about custom parameter reporting.

 

Open Sourcing our SDKs - We’re starting to open source 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 source project page and learn more in our blog post.

 

Swift -  We’ve updated our iOS SDK to handle Swift language nuances, making Swift development a more native experience on Firebase. For example in our Swift APIs we remov FIR prefix from our class names, rename FIRApp to FirebaseApp, and FIROptions to FirebaseOptions. These changes are designed to improve the development experience of Swift developers, while at the same time keeping the existing API conventions for our Objective-C users.

 

Games - We’ve heard that one of the most important stats for Game Devs 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 [We also added Unity plugins and a C++ SDK back in February at GDC]. To see an example of a game built on top of Firebase, check out our Mecha Hamster app on Github.

 

New Website - We redesigned our site, check it out! http://firebase.google.com

 

Firebase Alpha Program - Our new alpha testing program means you have the opportunity to test our cutting edge 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 on the Firebase Alpha form.

 

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Phew!

Thank you for your support, and, most importantly, feedback. The Firebase community is the reason that we’ve been able to grow and improve at such an quick pace over the last year. We’re excited to continue working with you to build products for creating great apps.

 

Happy coding,

 

James

Firebase Product Manager & Co-Founder

PS. Here is the official blog post if you'd like all the details

[Jethro Bodine]

Any word on new querying features that were mentioned on here not too long ago. Was the feature I was looking forward to most but doesn't seem it will be appearing this I/O. 

[Ian Barber]

We're still looking at options, but one of the reasons we set up https://firebase.google.com/alpha is to give people a way to get involved with upcoming features, so if you're interested consider signing up!

On Wed, May 17, 2017 at 2:49 PM, Jethro Bodine <jeff.m....@gmail.com> wrote:

Any word on new querying features that were mentioned on here not too long ago. Was the feature I was looking forward to most but doesn't seem it will be appearing this I/O. 

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[Doug Thompson]

Really exciting stuff - and brilliant way to handle hosting by integrating it with cloud functions.

Server side rendering FTW! Can now host Angular etc and still be SEO-friendly without needing to bolt on some framework or other. Great work!

However, and maybe I missed this, was hoping to see some kind of idea of how to integrate web-based analytics. If you host a site on Firebase you can use Google Analytics, but the whole point of Google Analytics for Firebase in my mind is to be able to link through to cloud functions.

Without being able to report analytics.events back from a web page, a key part of the tool set is missing, and for some of us a Firebase instance serves web, Android, iOS etc.

Or did I miss an approach here somewhere?

But all in all, another great set of announcements coming on the heels of Cloud Functions.

Congrats.

[Ian Barber]

Thanks Doug! You didn't miss anything specifically about Google Analytics for Firebase and the web, but its definitely an important area. The GA team are continuing to look at how they support app devs, whatever platform they're using. 

[John Hunt]

I have to agree with Doug -- I would be excited to use Google Analytics for Firebase if only there was a Javascript SDK that my organization could pull in to track events from our web site. Our analytics would be missing a big piece of the picture if we can only track events on the mobile clients but not our main web app.

That said, the recent announcements regarding analytics are pretty exciting.

[Christian Wheeler]

When can we expect the Android Phone Number Authentication to go live? The Firebase Docs page just says to check back late in May. We are really excited to use this in production.

Kind regards,
Christian

[Ian Barber]

Its coming soon, but unfortunately we're still waiting on all the ducks to be a row. We'll get that page updated to say early june :)

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[Christian Wheeler]

That's good to hear! Is there any specific reason why the Android version is taking longer than iOS and Web?

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[Ian Barber]

Just to let you know, the Android SDK is now available! You can see Android phone auth instructions here: https://firebase.google.com/docs/auth/android/phone-auth

[Christian Wheeler]

Thanks for the heads up! The Firebase team just keeps on delivering.