Dsc Firebase Introduction

Editor's Notes

• #2: Introduce yourself. You’re awesome, and you’re going to do an awesome job :) Let people know who you are. Today we’re going to go over a high level view of Firebase, what it is, and what it can do. While some of you have probably used Firebase before, there’s actually a surprising number of tools available, including a few new ones that were released at the Firebase Dev Summit in Madrid last September.
• #3: So what is Firebase? Firebase is Google’s client side application development platform, with a mission to help app developers of all sizes (large or small) succeed with their products. Firebase accomplishes this by taking common problems that occur during a product’s lifecycle, and making them easier to solve, be it by providing more information about your products, or providing tools to handle complex problems like security or network connectivity when storing data.
• #4: Firebase is divided into three main categories of tools with specific goals: helping you build better apps by making complex coding processes easier <CLICK> improving app quality by helping you catch issues early and fixing them quickly <CLICK> and helping you grow your app by understanding how other people are using it, and engaging with them in a meaningful way As you can see here, that’s almost 20 different products within Firebase. While that may seem like a lot, and we’re going to briefly discuss each of them, the average developer will only use a handful of them in each app. The goal isn’t to overwhelm you, but rather to let you know what’s available when you need it.
• #5: In order to help developers use these tools quickly and easily, Firebase has provided a variety of SDKs. Some of the more commonly used SDKs support both iOS and Android mobile developers, a JavaScript SDK for web developers, and C++ and Unity SDKs game developers. For detailed explanations on how to use these SDKs, in depth resources will be discussed at the end of this presentation.
• #6: As mentioned earlier, Firebase products are divided into three main groups. The first set we will go over are the backend-as-a-service products, which help you build apps faster and more easily.
• #7: One of the hardest things to get correct in an app is security. Luckily, Firebase has you covered when it comes to protecting your user’s data. Firebase Auth is an out-of-the-box authentication UI that is optimized to give your users the best experience when logging into your app.
• #8: Firebase authentication works with a number of different third party identity providers, including Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Yahoo, and more, in addition to Google’s own identity services. Additionally, you can support custom email and password solutions, anonymous accounts, account linking, and phone number authentication. Once your users signs in with one of these services, Firebase assigns that user a record within it’s system. This includes a unique user ID and a signed token, so you get a consistent representation of your users -- and one that you can use against both Firebase's services and your own custom servers -- no matter how they sign in.
• #9: Cloud Firestore is a database tool that allows you to group data using document collection structures for straightforward access. This data is stored and synced between users and devices at a global scale, using a cloud-hosted, NoSQL database, which also supports basic queries in addition to direct data access. The goal of Cloud Firestore is to provide a backend data storage solution without having to go through the tedious process of setting up your own database server, authentication schema, REST endpoints, and everything else that goes along with building a typical database infrastructures. Most importantly, Cloud Firestore will automatically scale with your apps. As your app becomes more popular, additional machines will be added to your project, so you don’t need to worry about failing to support your users. It will also provide access to an offline version of data if your user happens to lose their internet connection while using your app.
• #10: While Cloud Firestore is great, it’s not the only solution available for storing your data with Firebase. The Firebase Realtime Database uses a simple JSON tree structure to store and access data. While more lightweight than Cloud Firestore, it still offers many of the advantages, such as real time syncing, offline support, and scalability. Additionally, Firebase Realtime Database supports the ability to know when users are connected to the database, and can be used in conjunction with Cloud Firestore, as each can serves its own unique purpose within your apps.
• #11: Although the Realtime Database and Cloud Firestore are great for storing more primitive data, sometimes you need to store and serve user-generated content, such as images or audio files, directly in your mobile app. Using Cloud Storage for Firebase, you can do exactly this, with some additional features to make your app even more robust.
• #12: Uploads and downloads handled by the Cloud Storage SDK are resumable, making them more resilient to changes in network connectivity. When a user’s connection is disrupted during an upload, the SDK will automatically handle retrying and resuming, which can be critical when dealing with the kind of network conditions often encountered on mobile devices. Downloading content uses a similarly robust system, allowing users to receive their data once a connection is successfully reestablished.
• #13: Once the user’s content is uploaded, it can be shared with other users of your app using the same SDK, and since you will likely run into situations where only certain users should be able to see or upload specific content, you can use Firebase’s security rules system along with Firebase Authentication to restrict content according to your app’s requirements.
• #14: Cloud Functions for Firebase are single-purpose JavaScript functions that are executed in a secure, managed Node.js environment within your Firebase project. They are powerful tools that lets you handle complex logical operations from within Firebase, such as performing operations on your Firebase database, or interacting with various other Google or external services.
• #15: Cloud Functions can also respond to events generated by other Firebase project features, such as authenticating users, updates to Firestore or the Realtime database, files being uploaded to Firebase Storage, analytics conversion events, or pub/sub events from the Google Cloud Platform. They can also be triggered by direct HTTP requests if you want to call a particular function directly.
• #16: Like everything else in Firebase, Cloud Functions will automatically scale to meet user demand. This means that even if your app is an overnight success, Firebase has you covered. Fortunately, you also only pay for the services that you use, so if you scale down under a set quota, you don’t pay for using Firebase Functions.
• #17: While Cloud Functions for Firebase are incredibly powerful, sometimes you just need a solution to a common problem. Luckily, Firebase Extensions were released at the Firebase Dev Summit last September. Extensions are a collection of pre-made, configurable Functions to handle common use-cases, such as resizing uploaded images, sending emails, or translating text to a different language. You can find a complete list of available Firebase Extensions on the Firebase documentations page, or directly from the Extensions page of the Firebase Console.
• #18: Nowadays, browsers are more performant and capable than ever, and front-end JavaScript frameworks, like Angular and Polymer, have simplified development of rich app-like websites. Firebase Hosting is a developer-focused static web provider that is fast, secure, and reliable. Content is cached using solid state drives around the world on content delivery network (or CDN) edge servers, and every deployed site is served over a connection secured with an automatically provisioned and configured SSL certificate. No matter where in the world your user’s are, you can expect them to receive your web page or progressive web app quickly and securely. Best of all, Firebase Hosting is easy to use, with the ability to deploy a web page with a single command from Firebase’s command line interface.
• #19: Using ML Kit, mobile developers can enhance their app’s user experience by applying machine learning models to better serve their users. By providing both cloud-based and device-based pre-trained models for common mobile use-cases, ML Kit allows developers without machine learning expertise to add complex features to their apps. If, however, you have already trained your own custom model, you can use ML Kit to host and serve it using the Firebase SDK, cutting out a lot of the complexity of your backend.
• #20: ML Kit provides a variety of models that can run on a device, in the cloud, or both. ML Kit models fall into two categories: vision, and natural language processing. Vision models allow developers to scan barcodes, detect faces, label objects and landmarks, or read text. Natural language processing models can take reading text a step further, by recognizing the language, translating it into a different language, or generate smart replies based on the content. These tools become even more powerful when combined with additional logic, such as augmenting faces, or triggering actions for a specific bar code. With the ability to expand on this with custom models, the possible offerings from developers grows exponentially.
• #21: Now that you’re familiar with all of the backend-as-a-service products, you can start to see that the real value of Firebase comes from the fact that everything fits together to help you solve your day-to-day development problems. Firestore and Functions will integrate seamlessly with authentication, security rules will help make sure users are only accessing what is pertinent to them, and data in Firebase Storage can be referenced by your databases, to name a few examples. Combined, Firebase provides a powerful tool without a lot of complexity or overhead.
• #22: Now that we’ve discussed the tools available to help build great apps, we can dig into how Firebase enables developers to understand how their users are interacting with them, and improve app stability for a better experience.
• #23: As much as we’d all love to believe our apps are perfect, everyone knows that they can crash in a variety of glorious ways. Tracking what crashed and why, as well as how to prioritize crashes for fixing, can be difficult and time consuming. Firebase Crashlytics helps mitigate some of this frustration by automatically collecting, analyzing, and organizing your crash reports with a simple gradle import on Android, or a cocoapod install on iOS. It provides a dashboard that not only shows crashes ranked by overall impact, but also intelligently groups crashes by app version with easily accessible stack traces. In addition, alerts can be set up to keep you informed of any sudden instabilities. Non-fatal errors, which can be even more difficult to track down than a full crash, can also be logged and reported on in the crashlytics dashboard.
• #24: Additionally, if you’re using the Android NDK, native C++ errors can also be reported back to Firebase Crashlytics, making it even easier to solve lower-level Android issues.
• #25: However, not every error in your app will be a crash or failure. Sometimes things will just be slow due to device, network, or location issues. Firebase Performance was created to help you in these situations by logging start and network latencies, as well as allowing you to record custom performance metrics. These metrics are then reported back through the Firebase Performance Dashboard, where they are grouped by country, device type, app version and operating system version in order to provide you with useful insights into the performance of your app. Firebase Performance works not only on mobile apps, but is also the only product in the industry that currently provides real user metrics for free.
• #26: Unlike developing on a single device, your apps will be used on a variety of device types, sizes and operating systems, and you will want your app to provide the same amazing experience for every user, despite any hardware or software differences. That said, being able to test every possible device and operating system combination is cost prohibitive for even the most tenacious of QA teams, which is why Google built Firebase Test Lab. Firebase Test Lab makes it easy and affordable to test your app with a variety of devices, and ensures that your app works great for all of your users. Firebase Test Lab consist of a massive selection of different devices running various operating systems, each hosted in the cloud. The easiest way to test your app is to run a robotest. This is an intelligent automated test that crawls your app to discover and exercise its various features, and does not require any additional code. You can also simulate specific test cases by recording interactions that will then be replicated on other devices in Test Lab. Once your tests have completed, each device used will provide reports with screenshots, device logs, and any crashes that may have occurred during the tests. Finally, Firebase Test Lab has multiple ways that it can be implemented to suit your workflow. You can upload and test apps using the Firebase Console through the command line interface to work with your continuous integration servers by directly deploying an Android APK from Android Studio or, for Android apps, by using the Google Play Store Developer Console’s special automated launch test for apps that have been published to either an Alpha or Beta channel
• #27: App Distribution was introduced at the 2019 Firebase Dev Summit, and is the next evolution of Fabric’s Crashlytics Beta. Stability and usability are crucial to any app’s success, and the best time to identify and fix issues is before they’re out in the wild. App Distribution makes it easy to get your app into the hands of testers, allowing you to fix bugs and stability issues before launch, keeping your user base happy. It enabled developers to deliver new iterative test builds to Android and iOS testers instantly, and allows them to manage all of their prerelease testing in one centralized location. Developers can distribute builds using the Firebase Console, or through the Firebase CLI tools. Additionally, App Distribution can be triggered by integrating the CLI tools with continuous integration jobs. While being able to easily push builds to testers is useful, this product shines when paired with Crashlytics to provide insights into the stability of each test build. From the tester’s perspective, installing a test build is as easy as opening an email and following the UI prompt to install the Android APK or iOS IPA directly onto their device.
• #28: The final group of products from Firebase helps developers grow their user base and engage with their users in a meaningful way.
• #29: Google Analytics for Firebase is at the heart of the features that help developers grow their apps. It allows developers to measure up to 500 different predefined or custom event types with up to 25 user properties per event, and Google Analytics will also automatically capture over 15 events, including when a user uninstalls the app. Information about demographics, retention, engagement and revenue is also automatically collected in order to help you gain valuable insight into your apps. The best part of this is that all of analytics is free with unlimited use, so you only need to focus on how you can improve your apps. One of the many useful features of Google Analytics for Firebase is that developers can set custom user properties in order to understand how different users interact with their app, and multiple users can be assigned to an audience. Once an audience is established, you can modify your in-app experience through remote config changes, targeted advertisements using adwords based on previous user behaviors, or trigger a specific Cloud Function. Where Google Analytics really shines is in the ability to export all of the collected data to BigQuery, which allows you to pull apart the data and analyze it in new and useful ways that fits your unique data requirements.
• #30: Traditional deep linking, while great in theory, rarely work as expected. In order to provide a more unified and consistent experience, Firebase released Dynamic Links, which are deep links that work the way most would expect on Android, iOS and even desktop browsers. While they can take users to an appropriate place in an app or website, they can also change their behavior based on whether or not the user has an app installed. If the appropriate app is not installed, users can be sent to a website or mobile app store to install the app before being taken to the appropriate place in the app. Although the functionality of Firebase Dynamic Links is already useful, when combined with Google Analytics for Firebase, developers can start to get a lot more value. Attribution analytics can help developers know which campaigns are bringing in the highest quality users, and can even give users a customized welcome screen based on that particular campaign. Dynamic links for app content, such as recipes or profiles, can also be shared directly from an app by users, rather than only coming from the developer. Most importantly, all stats for Dynamic Links will go directly into the Google Analytics for Firebase console, providing additional valuable insight into an apps use.
• #31: Firebase makes sending push notifications to users easy with Firebase Cloud Messaging. Notifications can be sent to Android, iOS and Web devices, and may be addressed to individual devices, groups of devices, such as audiences established in analytics, or even subscribed topics. In order to use Firebase Cloud Messaging, developers must register a user’s app instance with Firebase Cloud Messaging Services, then write code either on their server or through Firebase Cloud Functions to address devices based on id, group, or topic before telling the Firebase Cloud Messaging Server to send messages. Once a message has been sent, it will automatically report analytics information back to Firebase, such as if the user clicked on the notification to open the app. Firebase Cloud Messaging is a powerful and scalable tool that delivers hundreds of billions of messages a day, and is an excellent way to interact with users, and encourage engagement.
• #32: You will more than likely want your apps to be dynamic, either to respond to users’ changing needs, to tailor content for a particular group, or to test out new features before pushing changes to an entire audience. While this would normally take a lot of work and time that could be used elsewhere, Firebase Remote Config provides a solution using a simple key-value store. Since Remote Config lives in the cloud, developers can deploy changes in a matter of minutes, allowing them to implement forms of A/B testing with audience segmentation, or quickly update content for a particular audience. Firebase Remote Config is backed by a client library on Android and iOS that handles caching, keeping network requests lightweight, and contingencies for flaky connections.
• #33: While Firebase Remote Config works for A/B testing simple features, it would be time consuming to create multiple variants for more complex situations. Firebase A/B Testing takes the difficulty out of creating those vast systems by combining Firebase Remote Config, Cloud Messaging and Google Analytics for Firebase to implement more intricate experiments in mobile apps. To create an experiment, head to the console and decide which users you will target, as well as what elements you want to change, and the attribute that you would like to see improved. Firebase A/B testing will split the audience up into groups, and will make sure they’re seeing the correct version of the app. Once users have installed and used the app, Firebase will analyze any received data using sophisticated bayesian statistics so that you can be confident that the results you’re seeing are due to your changes and not random chance.
• #34: While analytics are great for knowing what users have already done in your app, you may want to tailor the experience for users based on what they will most likely do next, such as making purchases or uninstalling your app. Based on past behaviors, Firebase Predictions can group users into audiences based on their expected behavior by using a machine learning model. If a user is likely to stop using your app, you can use Remote Config to offer them something that re-engages them, or rewards them for being a valued customer. If you use notifications in your app, Predictions will help you know which users are least likely to open them. By predicting custom conversion events, you can avoid providing a negative experience for your users by annoying them with another new notification. Finally, predictions will refresh daily, so you can continue to personalize your in-app experiences based on changing user trends.
• #35: Now that you know the various features of Firebase, if you want to take a deeper dive into them, there’s a lot of great documentation at firebase.google.com/docs and the official blog at firebase.googleblog.com You can also find videos covering a wide array of topics from the Firebase team at youtube.com/user/Firebase For the latest news and updates, you can also follow @Firebase on Twitter
• #36: Re-introduce yourself. You just got up in front of people and did an amazing job :) Thank you all for coming.