Firebase Analytics vs Google Analytics

Many days ago, I found that Google is inviting users to move from Google Analytics to Firebase Analytics. When you try to get a configuration file for GA and your app is integrated with Firebase, they link your Firebase Analytics data to your GA account.

But there are many things I miss in FA:

• Screens: Google Analytics tracks screen views. And it offers many useful information: How long average are your users in a concrete screen? How many times is a screen shown?
• Behavior flow: Behavior flow is basic to understand what are users doing in your app. And the most powerful thing: What is happening with new users? Do they understand how to use your application when they use it for the first time?
• Drop-off: In GA you can navigate with many user flows and you can find how much users are dropping off in a concrete step. This can help you to improve your funnels: Can you reconduce your users in a concrete screen to continue doing stuff in your application?
• Compare segments: Sometimes I pick two versions of my application and I compare them. This way I can discover if there is something in the new version that confuses the user. Or maybe tehre is a bug that happens to a group of users that hasn’t been detected in QA process

And there are some other features of FA that Google needs to improve:

• Audiences: I integrated one of my applications with Firebase two weeks ago. Today I created many audiences and filters applied to an audience are not retroactive: New users will be grouped in that audience from the instant you create them
• Event time based audiences: I would like to create audiences based on the last time an event was fired. This way I would be able to create an audience of users who didn’t opened my app last 30 days and send them a push notification

Conclusion: Google has to improve many features in order to convince Product Managers to use Firebase Analytics instead of GA. I will keep using both of them.