Google LLC today updated its Firebase application development platform with various new features that it says will help to accelerate development cycles, run applications more efficiently and customize the platform to better suit individual developer’s needs.

Firebase is Google’s primary application development platform, enabling developers to develop iOS, Android and web apps. As well as providing an app development environment, it offers tools for tracking analytics, reporting and fixing bugs, and marketing and product experimentation.

Accelerating app development

Announced at the Firebase Summit, today’s updates include several new features aimed at improving developers’ productivity, Firebase Product Director Francis Ma said in a blog post.

They include a new Authentication emulator for the Firebase Emulator Suite that’s meant to enable rapid iteration and local development of applications, Ma said. The Firebase Emulator Suite, introduced last year, makes it possible to run emulated version of Firebase’s backend products for a faster and safer development experience. Ma said Google is expanding the suite with support for Firebase Authentication, which makes it possible to test the entire user management process on local machines.

“You can also use the new auth emulator to run integration tests that rely on authentication,” Ma said. “The Emulator Suite, now with Firebase Authentication, allows you to shift to a local-first developer workflow so you can experiment and rapidly iterate without touching production data, incurring costs, or worrying that you’ll break something.”

The other productivity updates introduced today include hosting preview channels (below) that enable developers to see the impact of any changes made to their apps before they publish them. The previews also make it possible to share these changes with team members via an obscured unique URL.

In addition, Firebase is getting more Extensions, which are packaged solutions that can be used to automate common tasks in projects and add new functionality in fewer steps. They include the new “Send Invoices using Stripe” and “Run Subscription Payments with Stripe” extensions that make it easier to integrate the Stripe payments platform with Firebase apps, and another one called “Detect Online Presence” that shows developers which users or devices are currently online, using their applications.

More actionable data

The second thrust of today’s updates is about generating more actionable data for developers so they can better optimize their applications and keep users happy, Ma said.

To that end there’s a new Performance Monitoring dashboard (below) that Ma said will help users take better notice of their app’s performance and stability metrics. The new dashboard has been refined to try to eliminate the problem of information overload that leaves a lot of developers overwhelmed.

“This new dashboard makes it crystal clear if one of your critical metrics needs attention so that you can take action, and it’s customizable, allowing you to bring the metrics you care about most to the forefront,” Ma said.

Google has made changes to Firebase Remote Config tool, which makes it easy for developers to dynamically alter their apps and test and release new features safely, without needing to publish a new version. For example, the Remote Config dashboard now contains more information about each experiment. Moreover, it’s now possible to filter for parameters that affect specific applications, platforms or a particular condition. Google has improved version targeting too, by making it available for iOS developers and making it possible to user numeric operators, Ma said.

Customizing Firebase

Google also wants to help developers customize Firebase for their specific needs, and to do so it’s adding three new application programming interfaces that provide more control over how they can collect, record and manage data.

The first of these APIs is Google Analytics 4 Measurement Protocol, which makes it possible to log events directly within Google Analytics. “This is especially useful for developers who want to augment their client-side data, with point-of-sale systems for example, so they can make server-to-server calls to gain new insights,” Ma said.

Next up is the Data API, which provides programmatic access to Google Analytics reporting data, while the Admin API makes it possible to configure access to Google Analytics and set user permissions.

The last update announced today relates to Google BigQuery, which is a fully managed serverless cloud data warehouse that enables scalable analysis of massive amounts of data.

“Over the years, we’ve seen many of you take advantage of our BigQuery integration by exporting data from Firebase, joining it with data from other channels, running sophisticated analysis — and even creating your own custom user segments in BigQuery,” Ma said.

Now, Google is making it possible to export these custom segments back into Firebase for more specific targeting of users with products such as Remote Config, Cloud Messaging and In-App Messaging.

“For example, if you have an ecommerce app and a physical storefront, you can import data from offline sources — like your store — and send those users an in-app promotion with In-App Messaging,” Ma explained.

Images: Google