Tag Archives: Firebase

Firebase Crashlytics graduates from beta

Originally posted on the Firebase Blog by Jason St. Pierre, Product Manager.

Back in October, we were thrilled to launch a beta version of Firebase Crashlytics. As the top ranked mobile app crash reporter for over 3 years running, Crashlytics helps you track, prioritize, and fix stability issues in realtime. It's been exciting to see all the positive reactions, as thousands of you have upgraded to Crashlytics in Firebase!

Today, we're graduating Firebase Crashlytics out of beta. As the default crash reporter for Firebase going forward, Crashlytics is the next evolution of the crash reporting capabilities of our platform. It empowers you to achieve everything you want to with Firebase Crash Reporting, plus much more.

This release include several major new features in addition to our stamp of approval when it comes to service reliability. Here's what's new.

Integration with Analytics events

We heard from many of you that you love Firebase Crash Reporting's "breadcrumbs" feature. (Breadcrumbs are the automatically created Analytics events that help you retrace user actions preceding a crash.) Starting today, you can see these breadcrumbs within the Crashlytics section of the Firebase console, helping you to triage issues more easily.

To use breadcrumbs on Crashlytics, install the latest SDK and enable Google Analytics for Firebase. If you already have Analytics enabled, the feature will automatically start working.

Crash insights

By broadly analyzing aggregated crash data for common trends, Crashlytics automatically highlights potential root causes and gives you additional context on the underlying problems. For example, it can reveal how widespread incorrect UIKit rendering was in your app so you would know to address that issue first. Crash insights allows you to make more informed decisions on what actions to take, save time on triaging issues, and maximize the impact of your debugging efforts.

From our community:

"In the few weeks that we've been working with Crashlytics' crash insights, it's been quite helpful on a few particularly pesky issues. The description and quality of the linked resources makes it easy to immediately start debugging."
- Marc Bernstein, Software Development Team Lead, Hudl

Pinning important builds

Generally, you have a few builds you care most about, while others aren't as important at the moment. With this new release of Crashlytics, you can now "pin" your most important builds which will appear at the top of the console. Your pinned builds will also appear on your teammates' consoles so it's easier to collaborate with them. This can be especially helpful when you have a large team with hundreds of builds and millions of users.

dSYM uploading

To show you stability issues, Crashlytics automatically uploads your dSYM files in the background to symbolicate your crashes. However, some complex situations can arise (i.e. Bitcode compiled apps) and prevent your dSYMs from being uploaded properly. That's why today we're also releasing a new dSYM uploader tool within your Crashlytics console. Now, you can manually upload your dSYM for cases where it cannot be automatically uploaded.

Firebase's default crash reporter

With today's GA release of Firebase Crashlytics, we've decided to sunset Firebase Crash Reporting, so we can best serve you by focusing our efforts on one crash reporter. Starting today, you'll notice the console has changed to only list Crashlytics in the navigation. If you need to access your existing crash data in Firebase Crash Reporting, you can use the app picker to switch from Crashlytics to Crash Reporting.

Firebase Crash Reporting will continue to be functional until September 8th, 2018 - at which point it will be retired fully.

Upgrading to Crashlytics is easy: just visit your project's console, choose Crashlytics in the left navigation and click "Set up Crashlytics":

Linking Fabric and Firebase Crashlytics

If you're currently using both Firebase and Fabric, you can now link the two to see your existing crash data within the Firebase console. To get started, click "Link app in Fabric" within the console and go through the flow on fabric.io:

If you are only using Fabric right now, you don't need to take any action. We'll be building out a new flow in the coming months to help you seamlessly link your existing app(s) from Fabric to Firebase. In the meantime, we encourage you to try other Firebase products.

We are excited to bring you the best-in class crash reporter in the Firebase console. As always, let us know your thoughts and we look forward to continuing to improve Crashlytics. Happy debugging!

Source: Google Developers Blog

Google Analytics for Firebase: New Look and New Features

If you use Google Analytics for Firebase to measure your apps, you'll notice something familiar today: a new look and feel that's more consistent with your Google Analytics experience.

These new elements echo some of the changes we made to Google Analytics earlier this year — the updates should help bridge the gap for anyone who uses both Google Analytics and Google Analytics for Firebase. We've also added new reports and cards that will make the Google Analytics for Firebase Dashboard more timely and helpful.

Real-Time Data

We are now providing you with more real-time information throughout Google Analytics for Firebase to give you a better read on what’s happening in your app.

Inside the Google Analytics for Firebase Dashboard, you’ll now find a real-time card, much like the one on the Google Analytics Home. It shows details on the number of active users in the past 30 minutes. You'll also see the top conversion events logged by the app. You can configure these conversions so you can track app events that are most important to your team.

The new Google Analytics for Firebase Dashboard

Google Analytics for Firebase has a brand new stability card that reports on data from Firebase Crash Reporting and Firebase Crashlytics. It displays the percentage of users who have not had their app crash, so you can see just how stable your app is.

Latest Release

The new Latest Release report lets app developers track the adoption and stability of new app versions within a few hours of release.

The report also contains a real-time card with an app version filter that lets you see which users have adopted the latest version of a release and know whether any versions have crashed in the past 30 minutes. It also lets you measure your users’ level of engagement.

Same Great Analytics

The updated experience is more consistent with Google Analytics, but one thing hasn't changed: Google Analytics for Firebase users still get the same great app-centric reporting and analysis they're used to for Android and iOS. Our engineers are working on developments and new features we'll share in the months to come.

To see the new look and updated features, check out your Firebase project now. (Don't have one yet? Sign up!)

Posted by Sukriti Singal, Product Manager, Google Analytics

Source: Google Analytics Blog

Better A/B Testing with Firebase

Earlier this year, the Google Optimize and Firebase teams worked together to bring A/B testing functionality to Firebase. Last week, at the Firebase Dev Summit, we announced that A/B testing is now available in beta to all app developers.

This post originally appeared on The Firebase Blog.

Announcing Better A/B Testing with Firebase

If you're like most app developers, you know that small changes can often make a big difference in the long term success of your app. Whether it's the wording that goes into your "Purchase" button, the order in which dialogs appear in your sign-up flow, or how difficult you've made a particular level of a game, that attention to detail can often make the difference between an app that hits the top charts, or one that languishes.

But how do you know you've made the right changes? You can certainly make some educated guesses, ask friends, or run focus groups. But often, the best way to find out how your users will react to changes within your app is to simply try out those changes and see for yourself. And that's the idea behind A/B testing; it lets you release two (or more!) versions of your app simultaneously among randomly selected users to find out which version truly is more successful at getting the results you want.

And while Firebase Remote Config did allow you to perform some simple A/B testing through it's "random percentile" condition, we've gone ahead and added an entirely new experiment layer in Firebase that works with Remote Config and notifications to make it quick and easy to set up and measure sophisticated A/B tests. Let's take a quick tour of how it works!

Getting to Know the New A/B Testing Feature

With the new A/B testing feature, you can create an A/B test that will allow you to play with any combination of values that you can control through Remote Config. Setting up an A/B test allows you to define how the experiment will behave in a number of different ways, including determining how many of your users are involved with the experiment at first…

…how many variants you want to run, and how your app might behave differently for each variant…

...and what the goal of the experiment is.

Different experiments might have different desired goals, and A/B testing supports a number of common outcomes, like increasing overall revenue or retention in your app, reducing the number of crashes, or increasing the occurrence of any event you're measuring in Google Analytics for Firebase, such as finishing your in-app tutorial.

Once you've defined your A/B test, Firebase takes over by delivering these different variations of your app to randomly-selected members of your audience. Firebase will then measure your users' behavior over time, and let you know when an experiment appears to be performing better, based on those goals you've defined earlier. Firebase A/B testing measures these results for you with the same Bayesian statistical models that power Google Optimize, Google's free testing and personalization product for websites.

Using A/B Tests for Better Onboarding: A Case Study

Fabulous, a motivational app for building better habits, recently made improvements to their app's onboarding by using Firebase A/B testing. When the user first starts an app, Fabulous shows them how to complete a habit, presents them with a letter about forming better habits, and then asks them to commit to a simple routine. The team suspected that if they removed a few steps from this onboarding process, more people might complete it.

Some of the screens a typical user encounters when first using Fabulous.

So they ran an A/B test where some users didn't see the letter, others didn't see the request to commit to a simple routine, and others skipped both of those steps. The Fabulous team found that by removing both of these steps from the onboarding process, there was a 7% improvement in the rate of users completing the onboarding flow. More importantly, they confirmed that this shorter onboarding experience didn't have any impact on their app's retention.

Test Your Notifications, Too!

You also have the ability to A/B test your app notification messages through the Firebase Notifications console. You can try out different versions of your notification message and see which ones lead to more users opening up your app from that notification, or which messages lead to users performing some intended goal within your app, like making a purchase.

Getting Started

A/B testing is available in beta to all Firebase developers starting today. If you're excited to get started, you should make sure that your app is wired up to use Remote Config and/or Firebase Cloud Messaging, and that you've updated these libraries to the latest and greatest versions. You can always find out more about A/B testing in our documentation, or check out the A/B Test Like a Pro video series we've been building.

Then, head on over to the Firebase Console and start making your app better — one experiment at a time!

Posted by Todd Kerpelman, Google Firebase team

Source: Google Analytics Blog

Introducing Cloud Firestore: Our New Document Database for Apps

Originally posted by Alex Dufetel on the Firebase Blog

Today we're excited to launch Cloud Firestore, a fully-managed NoSQL document database for mobile and web app development. It's designed to easily store and sync app data at global scale, and it's now available in beta.

Key features of Cloud Firestore include:

Documents and collections with powerful querying
iOS, Android, and Web SDKs with offline data access
Real-time data synchronization
Automatic, multi-region data replication with strong consistency
Node, Python, Go, and Java server SDKs

And of course, we've aimed for the simplicity and ease-of-use that is always top priority for Firebase, while still making sure that Cloud Firestore can scale to power even the largest apps.

Optimized for app development

Managing app data is still hard; you have to scale servers, handle intermittent connectivity, and deliver data with low latency.

We've optimized Cloud Firestore for app development, so you can focus on delivering value to your users and shipping better apps, faster. Cloud Firestore:

Synchronizes data between devices in real-time. Our Android, iOS, and Javascript SDKs sync your app data almost instantly. This makes it incredibly easy to build reactive apps, automatically sync data across devices, and build powerful collaborative features -- and if you don't need real-time sync, one-time reads are a first-class feature.

Uses collections and documents to structure and query data. This data model is familiar and intuitive for many developers. It also allows for expressive queries. Queries scale with the size of your result set, not the size of your data set, so you'll get the same performance fetching 1 result from a set of 100, or 100,000,000.

Enables offline data access via a powerful, on-device database. This local database means your app will function smoothly, even when your users lose connectivity. This offline mode is available on Web, iOS and Android.

Enables serverless development. Cloud Firestore's client-side SDKs take care of the complex authentication and networking code you'd normally need to write yourself. Then, on the backend, we provide a powerful set of security rules so you can control access to your data. Security rules let you control which users can access which documents, and let you apply complex validation logic to your data as well. Combined, these features allow your mobile app to connect directly to your database.

Integrates with the rest of the Firebase platform. You can easily configure Cloud Functions to run custom code whenever data is written, and our SDKs automatically integrate with Firebase Authentication, to help you get started quickly.

Putting the 'Cloud' in Cloud Firestore

As you may have guessed from the name, Cloud Firestore was built in close collaboration with the Google Cloud Platform team.

This means it's a fully managed product, built from the ground up to automatically scale. Cloud Firestore is a multi-region replicated database that ensures once data is committed, it's durable even in the face of unexpected disasters. Not only that, but despite being a distributed database, it's also strongly consistent, removing tricky edge cases to make building apps easier regardless of scale.

It also means that delivering a great server-side experience for backend developers is a top priority. We're launching SDKs for Java, Go, Python, and Node.js today, with more languages coming in the future.

Another database?

Over the last 3 years Firebase has grown to become Google's app development platform; it now has 16 products to build and grow your app. If you've used Firebase before, you know we already offer a database, the Firebase Realtime Database, which helps with some of the challenges listed above.

The Firebase Realtime Database, with its client SDKs and real-time capabilities, is all about making app development faster and easier. Since its launch, it has been adopted by hundred of thousands of developers, and as its adoption grew, so did usage patterns. Developers began using the Realtime Database for more complex data and to build bigger apps, pushing the limits of the JSON data model and the performance of the database at scale. Cloud Firestore is inspired by what developers love most about the Firebase Realtime Database while also addressing its key limitations like data structuring, querying, and scaling.

So, if you're a Firebase Realtime Database user today, we think you'll love Cloud Firestore. However, this does not mean that Cloud Firestore is a drop-in replacement for the Firebase Realtime Database. For some use cases, it may make sense to use the Realtime Database to optimize for cost and latency, and it's also easy to use both databases together. You can read a more in-depth comparison between the two databases here.

We're continuing development on both databases and they'll both be available in our console and documentation.

Get started!

Cloud Firestore enters public beta starting today. If you're comfortable using a beta product you should give it a spin on your next project! Here are some of the companies and startups who are already building with Cloud Firestore:

Get started by visiting the database tab in your Firebase console. For more details, see the documentation, pricing, code samples, performance limitations during beta, and view our open source iOS and JavaScript SDKs on GitHub.

We can't wait to see what you build and hear what you think of Cloud Firestore!

Source: Google Developers Blog

Making Great Mobile Games with Firebase

So much goes into building and maintaining a mobile game. Let’s say you want to ship it with a level builder for sharing content with other players and, looking forward, you want to roll out new content and unlockables linked with player behavior. Of course, you also need players to be able to easily sign into your soon-to-be hit game.

With a DIY approach, you’d be faced with having to build user management, data storage, server side logic, and more. This will take a lot of your time, and importantly, it would take critical resources away from what you really want to do: build that amazing new mobile game!

Our Firebase SDKs for Unity and C++ provide you with the tools you need to add these features and more to your game with ease. Plus, to help you better understand how Firebase can help you build your next chart-topper, we’ve built a sample game in Unity and open sourced it: MechaHamster. Check it out on Google Play or download the project from GitHub to see how easy it is to integrate Firebase into your game.

Before you dive into the code for Mecha Hamster, here’s a rundown of the Firebase products that can help your game be successful.

Analytics

One of the best tools you have to maintain a high-performing game is your analytics. With Google Analytics for Firebase, you can see where your players might be struggling and make adjustments as needed. Analytics also integrates with Adwords and other major ad networks to maximize your campaign performance. If you monetize your game using AdMob, you can link your two accounts and see the lifetime value (LTV) of your players, from in-game purchases and AdMob, right from your Analytics console. And with Streamview, you can see how players are interacting with your game in realtime.

Test Lab for Android - Game Loop Test

Before releasing updates to your game, you’ll want to make sure it works correctly. However, manual testing can be time consuming when faced with a large variety of target devices. To help solve this, we recently launched Firebase Test Lab for Android Game Loop Test at Google I/O. If you add a demo mode to your game, Test Lab will automatically verify your game is working on a wide range of devices. You can read more in our deep dive blog post here.

Authentication

Another thing you’ll want to be sure to take care of before launch is easy sign-in, so your users can start playing as quickly as possible. Firebase Authentication can help by handling all sign-in and authentication, from simple email + password logins to support for common identity providers like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Github. Just announced recently at I/O, Firebase also now supports phone number authentication. And Firebase Authentication shares state cross-device, so your users can pick up where they left off, no matter what platforms they’re using.

Remote Config

As more players start using your game, you realize that there are few spots that are frustrating for your audience. You may even see churn rates start to rise, so you decide that you need to push some adjustments. With Firebase Remote Config, you can change values in the console and push them out to players. Some players having trouble navigating levels? You can adjust the difficulty and update remotely. Remote Config can even benefit your development cycle; team members can tweak and test parameters without having to make new builds.

Realtime Database

Now that you have a robust player community, you’re probably starting to see a bunch of great player-built levels. With Firebase Realtime Database, you can store player data and sync it in real-time, meaning that the level builder you’ve built can store and share data easily with other players. You don't need your own server and it’s optimized for offline use. Plus, Realtime Database integrates with Firebase Auth for secure access to user specific data.

Cloud Messaging & Dynamic Links

A few months go by and your game is thriving, with high engagement and an active community. You’re ready to release your next wave of new content, but how can you efficiently get the word out to your users? Firebase Cloud Messaging lets you target messages to player segments, without any coding required. And Firebase Dynamic Links allow your users to share this new content — or an invitation to your game — with other players. Dynamic Links survive the app install process, so a new player can install your app and then dive right into the piece of content that was shared with him or her.

At Firebase, our mission is to help mobile developers build better apps and grow successful businesses. When it comes to games, that means taking care of the boring stuff, so you can focus on what matters — making a great game. Our mobile SDKs for C++ and Unity are available now at firebase.google.com/games.

By Darin Hilton, Art Director

Source: Google Open Source Blog

Hamilton App Takes the Stage

Posted by David DeRemer (from Posse)

Whether it's opening night for a Broadway musical or launch day for your app, both are thrilling times for everyone involved. Our agency, Posse, collaborated with Hamilton to design, build, and launch the official Hamilton app... in only three short months.

We decided to use Firebase, Google's mobile development platform, for our backend and infrastructure, while we used Flutter, a new UI toolkit for iOS and Android, for our front-end. In this post, we share how we did it.

The Cloud Where It Happens

We love to spend time designing beautiful UIs, testing new interactions, and iterating with clients, and we don't want to be distracted by setting up and maintaining servers. To stay focused on the app and our users, we implemented a full serverless architecture and made heavy use of Firebase.

A key feature of the app is the ticket lottery, which offers fans a chance to get tickets to the constantly sold-out Hamilton show. We used Cloud Functions for Firebase, and a data flow architecture we learned about at Google I/O, to coordinate the lottery workflow between the mobile app, custom business logic, and partner services.

For example, when someone enters the lottery, the app first writes data to specific nodes in Realtime Database and the database's security rules help to ensure that the data is valid. The write triggers a Cloud Function, which runs business logic and stores its result to a new node in the Realtime Database. The newly written result data is then pushed automatically to the app.

What'd I miss?

Because of Hamilton's intense fan following, we wanted to make sure that app users could get news the instant it was published. So we built a custom, web-based Content Management System (CMS) for the Hamilton team that used Firebase Realtime Database to store and retrieve data. The Realtime Database eliminated the need for a "pull to refresh" feature of the app. When new content is published via the CMS, the update is stored in Firebase Realtime Database and every app user automatically sees the update. No refresh, reload, or pull required!

Cloud Functions Left Us Satisfied

Besides powering our lottery integration, Cloud Functions was also extremely valuable in the creation of user profiles, sending push notifications, and our #HamCam — a custom Hamilton selfie and photo-taking experience. Cloud Functions resized the images, saved them in Cloud Storage, and then updated the database. By taking care of the infrastructure work of storing and managing the photos, Firebase freed us up to focus on making the camera fun and full of Hamilton style.

Developing UI? Don't Wait For It.

With only three months to design and deliver the app, we knew we needed to iterate quickly on the UX and UI. Flutter's hot reload development cycle meant we could make a change in our UI code and, in about a second, see the change reflected on our simulators and phones. No rebuilding, recompiling, or multi-second pauses required! Even the state of the app was preserved between hot reloads, making it very fast for us to iterate on the UI with our designers.

We used Flutter's reactive UI framework to implement Hamilton's iconic brand with custom UI elements. Flutter's "everything is a widget" approach made it easy for us to compose custom UIs from a rich set of building blocks provided by the framework. And, because Flutter runs on both iOS and Android, we were able to spend our time creating beautiful designs instead of porting the UI.

The FlutterFireproject helped us access Firebase Analytics, Firebase Authentication, and Realtime Database from the app code. And because Flutter is open source, and easy to extend, we even built a custom router library that helped us organize the app's UI code.

What comes next?

We enjoyed building the Hamilton app in a way that allowed us to focus on our users and experiment with new app ideas and experiences. And based on our experience, we'd happily recommend serverless architectures with Firebase and customized UI designs with Flutter as powerful ways for you to save time building your app.

For us, we already have plans how to continue and develop Hamilton app in new ways, and can't wait to release those soon!

If you want to learn more about Firebase or Flutter, we recommend the Firebase docs, the Firebase channel on YouTube, and the Flutter website.

Source: Google Developers Blog

What’s new from Firebase at Google I/O 2017

Originally posted on the Firebase Blog by Francis Ma, Firebase Group Product Manager

It's been an exciting year! Last May, we expanded Firebase into our unified app platform, building on the original backend-as-a-service and adding products to help developers grow their user base, as well as test and monetize their apps. Hearing from developers like Wattpad, who built an app using Firebase in only 3 weeks, makes all the hard work worthwhile.

We're thrilled by the initial response from the community, but we believe our journey is just getting started. Let's talk about some of the enhancements coming to Firebase today.

Integrating with Fabric

In January, we announced that we were welcoming the Fabric team to Firebase. Fabric initially grabbed our attention with their array of products, including the industry-leading crash reporting tool, Crashlytics. As we got to know the team better, we were even more impressed by how closely aligned our missions are: to help developers build better apps and grow successful businesses. Over the last several months, we've been working closely with the Fabric team to bring the best of our platforms together.

We plan to make Crashlytics the primary crash reporting product in Firebase. If you don't already use a crash reporting tool, we recommend you take a look at Crashlytics and see what it can do for you. You can get started by following the Fabric documentation.

Phone authentication comes to Firebase

Phone number authentication has been the biggest request for Firebase Authentication, so we're excited to announce that we've worked with the Fabric Digits team to bring phone auth to our platform. You can now let your users sign in with their phone numbers, in addition to traditional email/password or identity providers like Google or Facebook. This gives you a comprehensive authentication solution no matter who your users are or how they like to log in.

At the same time, the Fabric team will be retiring the Digits name and SDK. If you currently use Digits, over the next couple weeks we'll be rolling out the ability to link your existing Digits account with Firebase and swap in the Firebase SDK for the Digits SDK. Go to the Digits blog to learn more.

Introducing Firebase Performance Monitoring

We recognize that poor app performance and stability are the top reasons for users to leave bad ratings on your app and possibly churn altogether. As part of our effort to help you build better apps, we're pleased to announce the beta launch of Performance Monitoring.

Firebase Performance Monitoring is a new free tool that helps you understand when your user experience is being impacted by poorly performing code or challenging network conditions. You can learn more and get started with Performance Monitoring in the Firebase documentation.

More robust analytics

Analytics has been core to the Firebase platform since we launched last I/O. We know that understanding your users is the number one way to make your app successful, so we're continuing to invest in improving our analytics product.

First off, you may notice that you're starting to see the name "Google Analytics for Firebase" around our documentation. Our analytics solution was built in conjunction with the Google Analytics team, and the reports are available both in the Firebase console and the Google Analytics interface. So, we're renaming Firebase Analytics to Google Analytics for Firebase, to reflect that your app analytics data are shared across both.

For those of you who monetize your app with AdMob, we've started sharing data between the two platforms, helping you understand the true lifetime value (LTV) of your users, from both purchases and AdMob revenue. You'll see these new insights surfaced in the updated Analytics dashboard.

Many of you have also asked for analytics insights into custom events and parameters. Starting today, you can register up to 50 custom event parameters and see their details in your Analytics reports. Learn more about custom parameter reporting.

Firebase for all - iOS, games, and open source

Firebase's mission is to help all developers build better apps. In that spirit, today we're announcing expanded platform and vertical support for Firebase.

First of all, as Swift has become the preferred language for many iOS developers, we've updated our SDK to handle Swift language nuances, making Swift development a native experience on Firebase.

We've also improved Firebase Cloud Messaging by adding support for token-based authentication for APNs, and greatly simplifying the connection and registration logic in the client SDK.

Second, we've heard from our game developer community that one of the most important stats you monitor is frames per second (FPS). So, we've built Game Loop support & FPS monitoring into Test Lab for Android, allowing you to evaluate your game's frame rate before you deploy. Coupled with the addition of Unity plugins and a C++ SDK, which we announced at GDC this year, we think that Firebase is a great option for game developers. To see an example of a game built on top of Firebase, check out our Mecha Hamster app on Github.

Finally, we've taken a big first step towards open sourcing our SDKs. We believe in open source software, not only because transparency is an important goal, but also because we know that the greatest innovation happens when we all collaborate. You can view our new repos on our open sourceproject page and learn more about our decision in this blog post.

Dynamic Hosting with Cloud Functions for Firebase

In March, we launched Cloud Functions for Firebase, which lets you run custom backend code in response to events triggered by Firebase features and HTTP requests. This lets you do things like send a notification when a user signs up or automatically create thumbnails when an image is uploaded to Cloud Storage.

Today, in an effort to better serve our web developer community, we're expanding Firebase Hosting to integrate with Cloud Functions. This means that, in addition to serving static assets for your web app, you can now serve dynamic content, generated by Cloud Functions, through Firebase Hosting. For those of you building progressive web apps, Firebase Hosting + Cloud Functions allows you to go completely server-less. You can learn more by visiting our documentation.

Firebase Alpha program and what's next

Our goal is to build the best developer experience: easy-to-use products, great documentation, and intuitive APIs. And the best resource that we have for improving Firebase is you! Your questions and feedback continuously push us to make Firebase better.

In light of that, we're excited to announce a Firebase Alpha program, where you will have the opportunity to test the cutting edge of our products. Things might not be perfect (in fact, we can almost guarantee they won't be), but by participating in the alpha community, you'll help define the future of Firebase. If you want to get involved, please register your interest in the Firebase Alpha form.

Thank you for your support, enthusiasm, and, most importantly, feedback. The Firebase community is the reason that we've been able to grow and improve our platform at such an incredible pace over the last year. We're excited to continue working with you to build simple, intuitive products for developing apps and growing mobile businesses. To get started with Firebase today, visit our newly redesigned website. We're excited to see what you build!

Source: Google Developers Blog

Google I/O: New Ways to Put Users at the Center of Your Apps and Payments

Cross posted from Inside AdMob

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President, Ads and Commerce

I/O is a magical time at Google. Every year, thousands of developers gather in Google's backyard to share new product ideas and learn about our latest innovations in computing.

We're meeting at an exciting time for the developer community. It's a time when consumers have more choices than ever before—like where to shop, what to watch, which games to play and how to communicate with friends and family. Your product needs to stand out. You need tools to help your business grow. And you need to make sure your users are happy.

We think we can help.

This week, my team and I shared 3 new innovations for developers to make it easy for users to pay for your services, build profitable businesses and grow your user base.

Enabling users to pay with Google

Paying with Google for Panera Bread on Google Assistant

For users, this means faster checkout. Now they'll never miss a deal because they're stuck on a bus and don't want to pull out their credit card in front of strangers. They'll no longer experience the pain of stumbling on a sale that ends at midnight when they're tucked in bed with their credit card out of reach. Users can save time and headache by using credit and debit cards they've already saved to their Google Account whenever they see the option to pay with Google on supported apps or sites.

For developers, this API is a significant innovation that can enable faster checkout, drive more conversions, increase sales and reduce abandoned carts—all with a simple integration. Learn more about our Google Payment API here.

Earn more from your apps with the brand new AdMob

People turn to their mobile devices throughout the day to shop, communicate and stay entertained. For developers, in-app purchases are one way to monetize. Ads are another way.
AdMob was built to support the app ecosystem. With over 1 million apps across iOS and Android, AdMob has paid over $3.5 billion dollars in ads revenue to developers. But there's more we can do to help you succeed.

Today, we're introducing a completely redesigned AdMob. Rebuilt from the ground up, AdMob is now simpler to use and delivers richer insights about your users' in-app experiences.

Simpler to use: We've applied Material Design to all aspects of the AdMob look and feel to deliver an easy-to-use and intuitive experience across the entire platform—on mobile and desktop. You'll get more done in less time. Below you can see how easy it is to pick an app that you're monitoring, check out its key metrics and then quickly take action to fine-tune its performance.

Redesigned AdMob experience

Deeper insights: We've also integrated Google Analytics for Firebase into the core of the redesigned AdMob so you have quick access to the metrics that matter most for your business. Once you link your AdMob and Firebase accounts, you'll have access to detailed ad revenue data and user insights like time spent in the app and in-app purchases—all in one place.

Google Analytics for Firebase dashboard in AdMob

Know your user, find your user with Universal App Campaigns

Earning money from your app is one piece of the puzzle. You also need to think about how to grow your user base.

Google's app innovations have delivered over 5 billion installs from ads and we are now helping developers drive over 3 billion in-app events per quarter—like users adding something to their cart or reaching level 3 of a game. Developers have gravitated toward Universal App Campaigns (UAC) as the "one stop shop" campaign type that scales your reach and maximizes app installs across Google's largest properties: Google Play, Search, YouTube, Gmail and the Display Network. UAC uses Google's machine learning technology to evaluate numerous signals in real time, refining each ad to help you reach your most engaged users. We're continuing to double down on UAC, with all new innovations being built into UAC to make app promotion even more effective.

Engage users in key moments of discovery with new UAC placements in Google Play

Android reaches more than 2 billion active devices every month, with Google Play available in 190+ countries around the world. It's the place users come to discover new apps and games. Beyond searching for apps to try, users are increasingly browsing the Play store and finding recommendations for new apps.

To help those users discover more of your apps, we are introducing new ad placements on the home and app listing pages in the Google Play Store. These new placements, available exclusively through UAC, help you reach users in "discovery mode" as they swipe, tap and scroll in search of their next favorite app.

New ad placements reach users browsing in Google Play

Discover more of your best users with new bidding options in UAC

Some users are more valuable to your business than others, like the players who level-up in your game or the loyal travelers who book several flights a month. That's why we're expanding Smart Bidding strategies in UAC to help you acquire more of these high-value users. Using Smart Bidding, you can tailor bids for your unique business goals - target cost per acquisition (tCPA) or target return on ad spend (tROAS). UAC delivers the right users based on your objectives: installs, events and, coming soon, value. This update starts rolling out to iOS and Android developers and advertisers in the coming months.

Introducing App Attribution Partners, a new measurement program

Many developers rely on third-party measurement providers to measure the impact of ads and gain valuable insights about how users engage with your app. To help you take action on these insights in a faster and more seamless way, we are introducing App Attribution Partners, a new program designed to integrate data from 7 global companies right into AdWords.

Welcome to adjust, Adways, AppsFlyer, Apsalar, CyberZ, Kochava and TUNE... we're thrilled to have them onboard!

AdWords' integration with these partners ensures that you have consistent, reliable and more granular data where you review app metrics. Now you can take action with confidence and stay on top of your business performance.

As consumers live more of their lives online, it's increasingly important for developers to build user-centric experiences in everything that you do—from the apps you design, to the experiences you deliver, to the ways you help people transact. We know it's not always easy, so Google is here to help.

We look forward to continuing on this journey with you.

Source: Google Developers Blog

Google I/O 2017: Empowering developers to build the best experiences across platforms

By Jason Titus, Vice President, Developer Product Group
It's great to be in our backyard again for Google I/O to connect with developers around the world. The 7,200 attendees at Shoreline Amphitheatre, millions of viewers on the livestream, and thousand of developers at local I/O Extended events across 80+ countries heard about our efforts to make the lives of developers easier -- allowing them to focus on the problems they're trying to solve by minimizing the pain points of building a product.
Earlier this morning, our CEO Sundar Pichai talked about our various billion-user platforms. Whether it's Android or Chrome or the mobile Web, our success would not have been possible without the developer community. And during our Developer Keynote, we covered our heavy investments in tools and services for developers who build on our platforms every day.
We have a lot to cover over the next three days. Let's take a closer look at the major developer news at I/O so far:

Platforms that connect developers to billions of users around the world

Android O Developer Preview 2 — Get a look at the next release of Android O focused on fluid experiences that make Android even more useful, and our efforts to optimize battery life, startup time, graphic rendering time, and stability. Early adopters can opt in to the Android O Beta Program at android.com/beta and run Android O now.
Project Treble — Last week, we also introduced a new Android framework designed to help reduce the time and effort it takes device makers to upgrade a phone to a new version of Android, starting with Android O.
Android Go — We're optimizing Android to run smoothly on entry-level devices, starting with the O release. We're also designing Google apps to use less memory, storage space, and mobile data, including apps such as YouTube Go, Chrome, and Gboard.
Kotlin — Android is officially supporting the Kotlin programming language, in addition to the Java language and C++. Kotlin is a brilliantly designed, mature, production-ready language that we believe will make Android development faster and more fun.
Android Studio 3.0 Canary — Our new preview includes three major features to accelerate development flow: a new suite of app performance profiling tools to quickly diagnose performance issues, support for the Kotlin programming language, and increased Gradle build speeds for large sized app projects.
Mobile Web — AMP and Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are re-defining modern mobile web development. AMP gets content in front of users fast and PWAs deliver app-focused experiences that are reliable, fast and engaging. We're seeing success stories from all around the world - travel company Wego has rolled out a successful AMP based PWA and Forbes has seen user engagement double since launching a PWA. If you're wondering how good your current web experience is, you can use Lighthouse - an automated tool for measuring web-page quality. Be sure to tune in this afternoon for the Mobile Web: State of the Union talk to hear more about building rich mobile web experiences.

Infrastructure and services to take mobile apps and the Web to the next level

Firebase — At last year's I/O, we expanded Firebase to a full mobile development platform with products to help you build your app and grow your business. Over a million developers now use Firebase, and we're doubling down on our efforts to simplify more every-day developer challenges. We're giving more insights to understand app performance through Firebase Performance Monitoring, introducing integration between Hosting and Cloud Functions, adding support for Phone Number Authentication, and continuing to improve Analytics in a number of ways. We've also started open sourcing our SDKs.
Mobile web developer certifications — At I/O'16 we launched the Associate Android Developer Certification. This year, we're adding two new certifications for web developers: the Mobile Sites Certification and the Mobile Web Specialist Certification.

Powerful tools to acquire and engage new users; grow successful businesses

Google Play Console — We announced several powerful, new features and reports in the Play Console to help developers improve their app's performance, manage releases with confidence, reach a global audience, and grow their business. The Play Console also has a new name, to reflect its broadened business uses, and a fresh look to make it easier to get things done.
Android Instant Apps — We opened Android Instant Apps, a new way to run Android apps without requiring installation, to all developers. Now anyone can build and publish an instant app. There are also more than 50 new experiences available for users to try out from a variety of brands, such as Jet, New York Times, Vimeo and Zillow.
Payments, Monetization & Ads — We introduced a Google Payment API that enables developers to give their customers the ability to pay in apps and online with credit or debit cards saved to their Google Account. New AdMob integration with Google Analytics for Firebase helps them monetize efficiently and updates to Universal Apps Campaigns will help them grow their user base.

New interfaces to push the limits of what's possible

Actions on Google for the Google Assistant — We brought Actions on Google to phones, introduced new features and functionality, improved our SDK and more. We also launched the Actions Console, a new developer console that helps developers work as a team, and collect data on app usage, performance and user discovery patterns. This new console is integrated with the Firebase and Google Cloud consoles.
VR and AR at Google — We'll have more to share on the latest Daydream platform features and developer tools during our "VR and AR at Google" session tomorrow (May 18) at 9:30 AM PT in the Amphitheatre and on the livestream.

It's important to us that developers are successful. In addition to building products that help solve developer challenges, we're on the ground in over 130 countries, growing and expanding the developer community through programs such as Women Techmakers & Google Developer Groups (GDGs). We're also investing in training programs like Google Developers Certification and courses through Udacity and other partners to help developers deepen their technical capability. We're also excited to announce two large multi-product developer events, Google Developer Days, which are planned for Europe (September 2017 in Krakow, Poland) and India (December 2017 in Bangalore, India). If you are interested to find out more, sign up for updates on g.co/gdd2017.
During Google I/O, attendees and viewers have an opportunity to dive deep into a number of these areas with 14 content tracks and 140+ breakout sessions -- covering Android to Assistant to VR -- and all livestreamed. We've also launched over 70 codelabs to get developers up and running with our latest APIs today.
Whether it's Android, Chrome, Play, VR/AR, the Cloud, and the Mobile Web — we're constantly investing in the platforms that connect developers to billions of users around the world. Thank you to the continued support and feedback from the developer community.

Source: Android Developers Blog

Firebase Analytics Gets New Features and a Familiar New Name

Can it be just a year since we announced the expansion of Firebase to become Google's integrated app developer platform at I/O 2016? That Firebase launch came complete with brand new app analytics reporting and features, developed in conjunction with the Google Analytics team.

Now, at I/O 2017, we're delighted to announce some exciting new features and integrations that will help take our app analytics to the next level. But first, we’d like to highlight a bit of housekeeping. As of today, we are retiring the name Firebase Analytics. Going forward, all app analytics reports will fall under the Google Analytics brand.

This latest generation of app analytics has always, and will continue to be, available in both the Firebase console and in Google Analytics. We think that unifying app analytics under the Google Analytics banner will better communicate that our users are getting the same great app data in both places. In Firebase and related documentation, you'll see app analytics referred to as Google Analytics for Firebase. Read on to the end of this post for more details about this change.

One other note: The launches highlighted below apply to our latest generation of app analytics – you need to be using the Firebase SDK to get these new features.

Now let’s take a look at what’s new.

Integration with AdMob
App analytics is now fully integrated with AdMob. Revenue, impression and click data from AdMob can now be connected with the rest of your event data collected by the Firebase SDK, all of it available in the latest Google Analytics app reports and / or in the Firebase console.

For app companies, this means that ad revenue can be factored into analytics data, so Analytics reports can capture each app’s performance. The integration combines AdMob data with Analytics data at the event level to produce brand new metrics, and to facilitate deep dives into existing metrics. You can answer questions like:

What is the true lifetime value for a given segment, factoring in both ad revenue and purchase revenue?
How do rewarded ads impact user engagement and LTV?
On which screens are users being exposed to advertising the most or the least?

With this change, you can now have a complete picture of the most important metrics for your business ― all in one place.

Custom parameter reporting
"What's the average amount of time users spend in my game before they make their first purchase?" Many of you have asked us for the ability to report on specific data points like these that are important to your business.

Custom parameter reporting is here to make that possible. You can now register up to 50 custom event parameters and see their details in your Analytics reports.

If you supply numeric parameters you’ll see a graph of the average and the sum of that parameter.
If you supply textual parameters you’ll see a breakdown of the most popular values.

As with the rest of your Analytics reports, you can also apply Audience and User Property filters to your custom parameter reports to identify trends among different segments of your userbase.

To start using custom parameter reporting for one of your events, look for it in the detail report for that event. You'll see instructions for setting things up there.

Integration with DoubleClick and third-parties – Now in Beta
We're also pleased to announce a new integration with both DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager. Firebase-tracked install (first open) and post-install events can now easily be imported back into DoubleClick as conversions.

This is a boost for app marketers who want a clearer view of the effect their display and video marketing has on customer app behavior. Advertisers can make better decisions (for all kinds of ads, programmatic included) as they integrate app analytics seamlessly with their buying, targeting and optimization choices in DoubleClick.

We also know that some of you use advertising platforms beyond AdWords and DoubleClick, so we continue to invest in integrating more third-party networks into our system. (We're now at 50 networks and growing). The goal: to allow app data from all your networks to come together in Google Analytics, so you can make even better advertising choices using all the data you collect. Learn more.

Real-time analytics for everyone
Google Analytics pioneered real-time reporting, so we know how important it is for our customers to have access to data as it happens. That’s why we’re so excited by the real-time capabilities we’ve introduced into our latest app reports. To refresh an announcement we made in March: StreamView and DebugView are now available to the general public. These features allow you to see how real-world users are interacting and performing with your app right now.

StreamView visualizes events as they flow into our app reporting to give you a sense of how people around the world are using your app, right down to the city level. Then Snapshot lets you zoom-into a randomly selected individual user’s stream of events. And DebugView uses real-time reporting to help you improve your implementation – making it easy for you to make sure you’re measuring what you want how you want. DebugView is a terrific tool for app builders that shows you events, parameters and user properties for any individual development device. It can also highlight any events that contain invalid parameters.

Same product, familiar new name
As mentioned above, we're rebranding Firebase Analytics to make it plain that it's our recommended app analytics solution, and is fully a part of the Google Analytics family.

Our latest reports represent a new approach to app analytics, which we believe better reflects the way that users interact with apps. This means that these reports have different concepts and functionality when compared to the original app analytics reports in Google Analytics.

If you're used to using the original app analytics reports in Google Analytics, don’t worry: they're not going anywhere. But we recommend considering implementing the Firebase SDK with your next app update so you can start getting the latest features for app analytics.

Good data is one thing everyone can agree on: developers and marketers, global firms and fresh new start-ups. We've always been committed to app-centric reports, because analytics and data are the essential beginning to any long-term app strategy. We hope that these new features will give you more of what you need to build a successful future for your own apps.

Posted by the Google Analytics team