What’s new in Firebase and how you can use it to grow your business?
Amidst a lot of chaos in 2020, there have also been some good things happening around. One of them being, the updates in Firebase which were introduced during the Firebase Summit 2020, a two-day event that took place from 27th to 28th October this year.
This year they have mainly focused on 3 domains:
- Accelerate app development — Helping you accelerate your app development with building blocks that solve many common problems involved with building your app
- Run your app — Helping you run your app more effectively by simplifying your workflows and surface actionable insights so you can optimize your app experience
- Tailor to your needs — Helping you tailor firebase to your needs by making the platform more extensible and giving you more control and flexibility as you scale
Accelerate app development
Speed, agility and productivity are even more important in today’s environment because we are working across a distributed team, and seeing shifts in customer’s demands and behavior. To help you stay focused on building amazing app experiences, Firebase provides fully managed backend services from databases that sync and store data in real time to cloud functions to help you run code in the cloud, to Firebase ML that makes it easy to add the power of machine learning to your app.
With these services you can quickly setup your infrastructure, create efficient workflows and add new features and functionality to your app in fewer steps.
Firebase Emulator Suite
Last year, the Firebase Emulator Suite was launched to let you run emulated versions of Firebase’s backend products for a faster and safer developer experience. This suite locally runs on your own machine enabling rapid iterations without touching production data or incurring costs.The emulator suite already supports hosting, real-time database, Firestore, Cloud functions and cloud Pub/Sub.
This year, Firebase has added a new product to this list, Firebase Authentication.
With Firebase Authentication, you have your own local development environment for managing test users and running integration tests that rely on authentication. It is easy to add it to your current development workflow.
After a quick setup, to boot the entire Emulator Suite up, run the following command:
firebase emulators:start
Your local development suite can now consist of the entire updated Firebase Emulator Suite. You can view each one with the emulator.
Emulator UI now has a new authentication tab for user management. You have all the options you need for creating new users, like Display Name, Email, Password, PhotoURL etc.
Connecting your app to the Auth Emulator is easy with the Connector API. It points your app to the local Auth Emulator port. After this API call, you do not need to change anything from your existing Firebase Authentication code. It works the same with the Emulator as it does in production.
One of the great features of Firebase Authentication are its Cloud Function Triggers. This trigger fires whenever a new user is created and checks for project invitations sent by other users in Firestore. So, when a new user signs up, they are automatically added to the projects they need.
Authentication triggers run locally, which gives you low latency responses, instant code reload and a much better development experience.
The Emulator Suite lets you shift to a local-first developer workflow so you can experiment and rapidly iterate without worrying that you will break something. It allows you to develop your code much faster.
Firebase Hosting
Firebase Hosting is another backend product that save you both time and hassle. It helps you easily deploy secure, fast-loading web apps and landing pages that are backed by a global CDN.
It includes features like:
- Cloud Logging Integration- that gives you more server-side analytics
- Better compression with Brotli- to boost your site performance
- Easier internationalisation- to improve support for localized content
- Preview Channels (most recent feature)- to let you see your changes before publishing them to your site
The Firebase Emulator Suite and Firebase Hosting can accelerate your app development by making iteration and collaboration easier, quicker and safer across teams.
Run your App
Once you’re ready to ship, you can use products like Test Lab, App distribution, Performance Monitoring and Crashlytics to release your app with confidence and improve its quality.
You can also make use of these products to help you increase user engagement:
The main goal is to surface actionable insights from your app data and simplify your workflows, so you can optimize your app and ultimately keep users happy. Any time you release the new version of the app, some of the first data points you will want to pay attention to are the stability and performance metrics. You want to make a first good impression with new users so they stick around and leave positive app store reviews that boost your ranking. No one wants slow apps.
Firebase Performance Monitoring
Firebase Performance Monitoring gathers and presents data about your app’s performance so you know exactly what’s happening in your app.
The Firebase Performance Monitoring dashboard is customizable, allowing you to add the metrics that are critical to your business. The dashboard looks something like this:
It takes loads of performance data about your app, organizes it and surfaces critical insights so you can focus on what’s important and take action to improve your app experience.
Another way to optimize your app is with Firebase Remote Config.
Firebase Remote Config
It lets you 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. There are a bunch of new improvements to Remote Config to help you organize and visualize your app configuration, so you can focus on the parameters that you care about the most.
The following are the dashboard improvements been made in 2020:
- Ability to group parameters that are related into their own folder
- Parameter sorting and filtering
- Improved search functionality
- Added experiment icon to jump right into the Experiments Results page
This will help you manage and control your app experiences as you grow.
Tailor to your needs
As your app and business grows, your development challenges may become more complex. So, in addition to adding more automation capabilities, Firebase provides with more control and flexibility so you can tailor their products to suit your sophisticated needs.
Google Analytics
One of the key factors in scaling a successful app is in knowing how your users are interacting with it. Google Analytics helps you understand what actions users are taking inside your app, where they are spending their time and why they churn, so you can make smarter decisions about your app’s direction.
Three new APIs have been introduced to make it easier for you to collect, record and manage your data.
- The Analytics Measurement Protocol -
It lets you log events to Google Analytics directly, allowing you to augment your client-side data.
2. Data API -
It provides you with the tools you need to programmatically access your Google Analytics reporting data. It is built for those of you who want to make their own custom dashboards or view data from multiple projects at once.
3. Admin API -
It gives you the ability to programmatically manage your Analytics configuration and user access rights. You can user permissions, or link Firebase projects to Google Analytics all through your own custom tools.
Together, these APIs give you the tools to quickly and dynamically adapt your information architecture to your growing business, so that you can spend less time tinkering in the console and more time building an app that delights your users.
Imported Segments
This is a new addition to Firebase. With Imported Segments, you can target any custom user segments with products like Remote Config, Cloud Messaging and In-App Messaging. This feature is available through the Firebase BigQuery integration. All you have to do is create your own 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.
This feature gives you more control and flexibility to target your users.
These are the updates and launches been made in 2020 for Firebase. With a business mindset and strategic use of these features, you can grow your business at another level.
Thank you for spending your time reading this.
Hope you found this helpful. Do leave your constructive feedback in the comments.
Happy Coding :)
