State of Firebase (mid-2020)

Official Firebase & Community Updates!

With Google events being cancelled in 2020 there may be fewer product announcements this year. Let’s take a look at was released since our last look at the State of Firebase

state-of-firebase-mid-2020-cover-image

Cloud Functions: now are private by default! IAM permissions are checked before your function is invoked and if the request fails authentication you are not charged for the request. Firebase CLI 7.7.0+ will set your HTTP functions to public for easy development, but protected HTTP functions are easily available with some permissions changes.

Cloud Firestore: C++ and Unity SDKs (Unity available via the Unity Package Manager.))

Firebase Games: single source for all Firebase product game support.

Google Analytics for Firebase: now supports Web Apps in the Console’s Analytics Dashboard. Create audiences, filter along endless dimensions, user properties and performance indicators. See real-time user engagement with all the results graphed instantly!

Remote Config: now supports Web Apps! Customise your user experience with complex config conditions across audiences and all platforms for a consistent cross-device experience.

Remote Styles with Remote Config: Dynamic/Conditional loading of CSS stored in Remote Config. Very alpha, very cool. [GitHub repo]

Cloud Messaging: now supports Web Apps via GA segmentation and funnels, managed and monitored from the Firebase console with the mobile platforms.

App Distribution: distribute prerelease versions of your app to trusted users on both iOS and Android platforms.

Firebase Extensions: pre-packaged code to automate common tasks in your project. Open-source for your inspection, configurable to your fit your needs and install-able via UI or CLI to fit your workflow.

firebase-extension-install-pre-canned-code

_Source

Crashlytics: Fabric has come to an end and is now completely integrated into the Firebase platform. Crash reporting via Crashlytics. Beta is now Firebase App Distribution. Analytics is completely integrated with GA for Firebase. Digits is now Firebase phone authentication.

Firebase Kotlin Extensions: finally out of Beta! [Release announcement]

Firebase Emulator UI: The Emulator UI aims to give you the freedom to develop on Firebase without concerns about billing or breaking a shared environment.

_{Firebase Emulator UI: local server UI for local Firebase emulators}

Firebase Summit 2019 was full of great demos and information. Check out the full playlist. My recommendations are:

Firebase Offline: What works, what doesn’t, and what you need to know
Faster web apps with Firebase: Use Performance Monitoring to measure and enhance your app (includes progressive loading of libraries).
What’s new in Firebase 2019

Open Source & Community

Official iOS SDKs have been open-sourced!
Official Android SDKs have been open-sourced!
Official Web Remote Config and Analytics SDKs have been open-sourced!

Firebase Explorer for VSCode extension

_{VSCode Firebase Explorer. Source}

asdf-firebase: An asdf-vm plugin for firebase-tools to manage your CLI without Node.js or npm. Great for all projects regardless of language!
typesaurus: Type-safe Typescript Object Document Mapper (ODM) for Firestore.
svarog: Generate Cloud Firestore helper functions for schema validation using JSON Schema.
firecoil: load images from Cloud Storage for Firebase in your Android app using the image loading library Coil.
reactfire: the Official Firebase React library is being revived to work with React Hooks APIs. Experimental status, but worth a look.
react-firebase-hooks: community-driven React Hooks library for Firebase products. Mature and stable.
VSCode Firebase Explorer: Visual Studio Code extension to explore and manage your Firebase projects in a VSCode side panel.

Sourced from awesome-firebase.

Still to come…

Firebase has previously teased features not captured in these releases. Most notably is the Synchronous Cloud Functions for Sign-in. This adds two more Authentication events to trigger synchronous calls to Cloud Functions, beforeCreate() and beforeSignIn(). This allows flows where a user is blocked from first sign-up or regular sign-in until your Function returns, allowing scenarios where you whitelist users with specific emails or domains. Needless to say, I’m excited to use this feature.

Conclusions

While a little quiet, there’s still plenty of goodies to keep us developing new and unique applications with the Firebase platform. Stay tuned for more as I’ll be doing another update later in the year, after all, there are 7 months of releases to go!

For more play by play updates, follow along with Awesome Firebase 🔥

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