The Firebase Blog: extensions

What’s new at Firebase Summit 2021

November 10, 2021

Kristen Richards
Group Product Manager

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.

Accelerate app development with new building blocks

Gain actionable insights to run your app with confidence

Scale with ease by using powerful engagement tools

Accelerate app development with new building blocks

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.

New Extensions for adding critical e-commerce features in less time

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

Enhanced support for Apple platforms, game engines, and Flutter

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

Strengthening app security with App Check

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

Detailed documentation for upcoming Google Play Safety policies

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

Gain actionable insights to run your app with confidence

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.

New real-time alerts in Performance Monitoring

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

Crashlytics adds Application Not Responding (ANR) reports and signals

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

Scale with ease by using powerful engagement tools

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.

Unified campaign management for Cloud Messaging and In-App Messaging

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

Remote Config core improvements and beta launch of personalization

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

Your partner throughout your app’s journey

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!

Kristen Richards
Group Product Manager

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.Accelerate app development with new building blocks

New Extensions for adding critical e-commerce features in less time

Enhanced support for Apple platforms, game engines, and Flutter

Strengthening app security with App Check

Detailed documentation for upcoming Google Play Safety policies

Gain actionable insights to run your app with confidence

New real-time alerts in Performance Monitoring

Crashlytics adds Application Not Responding (ANR) reports and signals

Scale with ease by using powerful engagement tools

Unified campaign management for Cloud Messaging and In-App Messaging

Remote Config core improvements and beta launch of personalization

Accelerate app development with new building blocks 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.

New Extensions for adding critical e-commerce features in less time

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

Enhanced support for Apple platforms, game engines, and Flutter

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

Strengthening app security with App Check

App Check protects your app and user data

Detailed documentation for upcoming Google Play Safety policies

The above image is an example only and subject to change Gain actionable insights to run your app with confidence 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.

New real-time alerts in Performance Monitoring

Performance Monitoring’s new real-time alerts will let you know if your app start time slows down

Crashlytics adds Application Not Responding (ANR) reports and signals

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 Scale with ease by using powerful engagement tools 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.

Unified campaign management for Cloud Messaging and In-App Messaging

The unified dashboard for Cloud Messaging and In-App Messaging lets you view and manage your campaigns from one place

Remote Config core improvements and beta launch of personalization

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 Your partner throughout your app’s journey 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!

What’s new from Firebase at Google I/O 2021

May 18, 2021

Kristen Richards
Group Product Manager

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

Remote Config updates help you better visualize and optimize your app configuration

Accelerate app development with new building blocks

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

Gain actionable insights to run your app efficiently

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.

GIF showing Firebase Performance Monitoring processing data

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

Optimize your user experience to scale with ease

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.

Coming up next

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!

Kristen Richards
Group Product Manager

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

The Storage Emulator joins the Emulator Suite for broader backend coverage

Firebase App Distribution now supports Android App Bundles for streamlined testing

Strengthening app security with App Check

New modularized Web SDKs improve load times

More Extensions for adding features and functionality

Gain actionable insights to run your app efficiently

Enhanced search, filtering, and games reporting in Crashlytics

Unveiling realtime data for Performance Monitoring and a revamped dashboard

Optimize your user experience to scale with ease

Remote Config updates help you better visualize and optimize your app configuration

Accelerate app development with new building blocks

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 loveGain actionable insights to run your app efficiently 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 forefrontOptimize your user experience to scale with ease 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. Coming up next 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!

Helpful product updates from Firebase Summit 2020

October 27, 2020

Francis Ma
Director, Product Management

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

Accelerate app development with new building blocks

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

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

More Extensions for adding features and functionality

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

Get actionable insights to run your app efficiently

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

Tailor Firebase to suit your needs as you scale

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

Looking ahead

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.

Francis Ma
Director, Product Management

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. Accelerate app development with new building blocks 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

More Extensions for adding features and functionality 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

Get actionable insights to run your app efficiently 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

Real-time config metrics for Remote Config

Tailor Firebase to suit your needs as you scale 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

Looking ahead 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.