Firebase 2021 Summit Feature Recap ๐Ÿ”ฅ๐Ÿ”ฅ๐Ÿ”ฅ

What's hot and what's new with Firebase

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3 min read

Firebase 2021 Summit Feature Recap ๐Ÿ”ฅ๐Ÿ”ฅ๐Ÿ”ฅ

For those of you who were unfortunate enough to miss the latest Firebase Summit, here is the tea on what's hot and what's new in Firebase ๐Ÿ˜‰.

  1. Firebase Extensions - BETA You can now plug into more services using firebase extensions. Notably, Stripe extension now supports one time payments and the Stripe dashboard now allows activation of other methods such as wallets and transfer with one click. The Firebase team had an application that illustrates just how simple it now is to glue stuff together and have an app up and running in no time.

  2. Apple Devs - Firebase Got Your Backs!!! There is now support for Apple TV and MacOS. This includes Crashlytics and Google analytics support for better insights into possible errors.

  3. Game Devs C++ SDK now supports Apple TV. Cloud Firestore now available for Unity and C++ SDKs. This means that you can easily sync your Games across all devices while getting better error reports from Firebase.

  4. FlutterFire ๐Ÿ”ฅ๐Ÿ”ฅ๐Ÿ”ฅ You can now import Cloud Firestore and Firebase authentication directly into DartPad!. Literally build Full stack mini-apps in the browser. Be sure to check it out at: dartpad.dev.

  5. AppCheck BETA AppCheck protects your applications from malicious traffic by ensuring the traffic using your Firebase resources come from actual instances of your app and from real users. Before AppCheck could protect Realtime Database, cloud storage and cloud functions, it now also supports cloud Firestore and custom backends. AppCheck now supports AppAttest and reCaptcha Enterprise as attestation providers.

  6. Privacy Win New detailed documentation explaining Google Play Safety recent policies coming soon.

  7. Performance Alerts - BETA You can now set up emails that fire if your app takes longer than a time you set to start up. This means that you know pretty quickly if there is an issue with your app and can fix it before it affects too many users.

  8. Firebase Crashlytics While Crashlytics is not new, it now reports Application Not Responding errors. It also has a new feature called Signals that basically analyses your errors and groups them into: Early crashes - (within 5 secs of app starting) Repetitive crashes - (frequent issues across users) and Fresh Issues - (new issues that just came up)

  9. Firebase Ads Firebase now lets you use other Ad platforms and gives more insightful reporting on your Ads. Thus enabling you to better test and optimise your Ads.

  10. Predictive Audiences With Google analytics integration with Firebase, you can now group your users by their predicted future behaviours. This allows you to re-engage users that are likely to drop off your app, for example. This makes for more strategic notifications and better A/B testing.

  11. Unified Campaign Management - BETA Bet you thought Firebase Cloud Messaging and Firebase In-App Messaging was cool? Well now you can manage them together through the same dashboard ๐Ÿคฏ ๐Ÿคฏ ๐Ÿคฏ

  12. Firebase Remote Config Remote Config allows you to send configurations to your app without needing an official release. I know what you are thinking, "But Fatuma, that's not new!"... bear with me just a moment. Personalisation which is in BETA has been added to Remote Config. This means you can now automatically adjust your app in accordance to what suits each user! Think of all the User Experience points you could score with this feature.

And that's pretty much a wrap. The features that I'm the most excited about are: AppCheck, Extensions, FlutterFire and the Unified Campaign Management. What are yours?

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