Eighteen months ago Firebase joined Google. A passionate community what was of 110,000 developers has grown to over 450,000. They previously offered features like Real Time Database, User Authentication and Hosting which made the app development much easier. But after the recent Google I/O, Firebase hit the headlines after its major expansion was introduced to the audiences present at I/O and the developers around world who witnessed a big surprise.
Google is turning Firebase into a Unified Platform. The existing Developers tools like, Google Cloud Messaging will be combined with its new and existing Firebase services.
Introducing Firebase Analytics
The same team that worked with Google Analytics comes along with their experience to make Firebase Analytics as a much deeply integrated analytic service. Adding a few lines of code to their apps is what developers need to do to implement the service. It is free and offers unlimited analytics solutions for mobile apps. It is user and event-centric and gives you an insight of what users are doing in your app. What it will do is it will feed the user information directly from your app to firebase. Developers will know about everything that happens on their app, for example, how your paid advertising campaigns are performing with cross-network attribution and everything will be monitored from a single dashboard
Audiences
To analyse the user behavior and monitor their activities is something Developers would always want to know more about. Firebase came up with Audiences, a new feature that offers to provide a single source of truth for your in-app activity. This will help the developer to see how their advertising campaigns are performing. It also allows the Developers to define group of users with common attributes and these features can be accessed from other firebase features and references of the audiences will be done by the Firebase team to help them get the exact information about user behavior. You can make remote configuration changes in your app. You could do an A/B testing as well, say for example, giving a user enough time to finish a certain level in your game.
New Notification System
Based upon Google Cloud Messaging, Firebase notification is a new UI built to deliver notifications to your users without even writing a line of code. Google Cloud Messaging has changed its name to Firebase Cloud Messaging. It helps you rearrange users, run marketing campaigns and also target messages to the Audiences in Firebase Analytics. It also offers Firebase users to free and unlimited notifications with support for iOS, Android and the Web.
Firebase Test Lab
Last year at Google I/O, Cloud Test Lab was announced, which has now been renamed to Firebase Test Lab, for testing mobile apps on real hardware with both automatic and customized testing hosted in Google data center. It also helps you find problems within your app even before the users do.
Crash Reporting & Dynamic Links & Some More
You never want your apps to crash as it is not good for your business and user base as well. It reports directly into your new analytic service so you can see how crashes affect your user and gives you a prioritized, actionable report for you to diagnose and fix the problems in your iOS or Android app after it is been shipped.
Firebase Dynamic Links makes the URLs more powerful. Basically what it does is that, it provides durability you can set rules for where they should take the users. They also allow for dynamically changing your destination of a link based on runtime conditions, by the type of device or browser. They can be used in email, web, social media and physical promotions to see an insight view into your growth channels. Say for example, if somebody has your app installed, the link can be directly pointed into the app. For the ones not having the app it can point you directly to the Play Store.
What Firebase Invites does, that it turns your customer into advocates. It also allows users to share referral codes or their favourite content via SMS or email to their preferred network to increase the apps reach.
Firebase App Indexing, formerly Google App Indexing, helps you bring app content to Google Search and the integration with Google’s AdWords and AdMob advertising platform.
A New Pricing Plan for firebase has also been introduced. A free plan with generous limits, a fixed rate plan for early-stage startup for those who need predictable monthly price and a metered pay-as-you go plan that does it scaling with the largest of apps.
Firebase can now be the recommended platform for Google, for them to build mobile apps. Google is firing all of its cylinders to make Firebase a powerful unified platform. They are doing everything to bring the users onto its cloud platform and in the future they might just accomplish it. Mobile Apps Development Specialist needs to wear their thinking cap for making the best use of Firebase.
With that being said, if you are Mobile App Developer or a Mobile App Development Company, Firebase has everything you need to build a mobile app and understand the user behaviour with its integrated Analytic service. This blog will give you an insight of what Firebase is and how you can make the maximum use of it.
