What’s new in Firebase — IO #17
2 min readMay 22, 2017
Great times are coming for Firebase. It was the subject of 25 talks at the recent Google I/O’17. So, what’s new?
This is a quick bullet point summary of all the new stuff already available or coming in the next few weeks:
Fabric
- Crahslytics is going to be integrated into Firebase as the main crash reporting solution.
- Digits technology will allow phone number authentication in Firebase, free for up to 10,000 verifications — which should cover most of the regular apps out there.
Phone authentication is available now on iOS and Web and comming to Android in the next weeks.
Digits SDK will be deprecated in the coming weeks, so keep an eye on Digits blog for more info on migration tools.
Opensource
- All Firebase SDKs are now open source https://opensource.google.com/projects/firebase-sdk
Firebase Cloud Functions
- Cloud functions now integrate with Hosting to provide full dynamic webapps.
Firebase Storage
- You can now map existing storage buckets into your Firebase project.
- The region in which your data is going to be stored now can be chosen. This is great for legal & performance reasons.
Firebase Database
- Expanding to 100,000 simultaneous connections.
- Introducing profiler to allow you to introspect bandwidth and latency at path level.
Performance Monitor (beta)
- New dashboard to get insights about your app network response latency, success rate, payload size, etc.
- Requires you to add a new sdk dependency into your app https://firebase.google.com/docs/perf-mon/
- It uses something called traces to measure time based events. Some are already defined but you can add your own.
Test Lab
- Adding first-class support for games: game tests can now run on test lab.
- Test lab now allows you to simulate different network conditions, like 4G, 3G, or slower ones.
- Expanding device seleccion to Google Pixel and Galaxy S7.
- Access to the lates version of Android O.
Firebase Alpha
- You can now sign up to get the new stuff before it’s released and provide feedback about it at https://services.google.com/fb/forms/firebasealphaprogram/
