Firebase Dev Summit 2016: Summary
I was excited to attend the Firebase Dev Summit 2016.
Well, not physically, not that I could afford going to Berlin for the summit, I watched the Live Stream broadcast worldwide. Last year, Google turned Firebase into its unified platform for mobile developers, which was really awesome! Firebase started providing it’s own sets of services for Mobile developers, and all (well, most of it) free of cost (up-to certain limit, of course). So I was waiting eagerly to see what more Firebase brings more to us this year!
For most of the day, I tried to watch the live stream at work, although missed quite a good part. You can watch the recorded live-stream here. It was a good show, and the fillers QA sessions were interesting too.
In case you missed any of it, here’s a brief composition of what was unveiled at the event:
- Firebase Crash Reporting came out of Beta: Previously, we had to wait for a good 20 min to few hours delay. Now, it has come down to close-to-one-minute.
- Firebase Crash Reporting also shows Analytics Data: In case you defined events and parameters to be logged via Firebase Analytics, it specifically shows the path of actions user followed before he faced the crash. Good for getting insight on how users behave!
- Firebase Test Lab got a free Tier service: The free tier (Spark plan) now has options to run five tests each day on physical devices and ten tests per day on virtual devices.
- New devices included in Firebase Test Lab: For bringing variety to testing, 11 new popular Android device models was added in Test Lab.
- Firebase Analytics can now export data to Google BigQuery in realtime: In case you want to take analyze and decide faster and better from your app’s data!
- Firebase now has a Unity Plugin: It currently supports Analytics, Realtime Database, Authentication, Dynamic Links, Remote Config, Notifications etc.
- Firebase now has a open-sourced UI library: Although I haven’t got time to look into it, Firebase has updated FirebaseUI to v1.0 and it’s said to be
… a library that provides common UI elements when building apps, and it’s a quick way to integrate with Firebase.
- New Udacity courses: Firebase has added two new 2-day Udacity courses (weekend course) to help get Android and iOS dev up-to speed with Firebase’s services. ANd both the courses are FREE!!
- Firebase Admin SDK is released: Firebase announced the addition of new Firebase Admin SDKs this year too. It is said to provide
… developers with programmatic, second-party access to Firebase services from server environments. Second-party here refers to the fact that the SDKs are granted elevated permissions that allow them to do more than a normal, untrusted client device can.
- Now the BIG news, Firebase Analytics introduced Live DebugView: You can now view each activity your users’ are having in your app, in real-time, along with crashes and other data. It’s part of the Firebase Analytics and is currently offered in limited availability and will be made more broadly available later this year. This would help the developers A LOT to decide and act based on users’ interest and interaction in the app.
So, this was the summary of what fresh came out of this years’ Firebase Dev Summit. Given Firebase’s capabilities, it might not seem like that much; but I personally think the Live DebugView is gonna be a real game-changer in the coming days.
P.S: Want to get your hands dirty on Android, iOS and Web Development with Firebase? Here’s the link to Firebase Codelab.
This ends the blog on Firebase Dev Summit 2016 Summary. Hope it helped you as much as it helped me!
Feel free to comment, like, recommend, share! And follow My Online Cafe to get more updates on Tech Stuff!
