The Firebase Test Lab team is pleased to announce that developers now have the ability to write Cloud Functions triggers that receive test results from Firebase Test Lab. Previously, developers had to manually check for test results, or write code to periodically poll the Test Lab API for test results. With Cloud Functions triggers, it becomes much easier to know immediately when a test finishes and get a summary of its results.
Firebase Test Lab enables you to run scripted and automated tests against your app on a wide variety of Android and iOS devices hosted in a Google data center. Cloud Functions now extends the capabilities of Test Lab by providing a fully managed backend to let developers write and deploy code that triggers when a test completes. Test Lab triggers written for deployment to Cloud Functions take the following form when using the Firebase SDK for JavaScript and deployed with the Firebase CLI:
exports.matrixOnComplete = functions.testLab.testMatrix().onComplete(testMatrix => { const matrixId = testMatrix.testMatrixId; switch (testMatrix.state) { case 'FINISHED': // Test finished with results // Check testMatrix.outcomeSummary for pass/fail break; case 'ERROR': // Test completed with an infrastructure error break; // check other possible status codes... } return null; });
You can use these triggers to programmatically notify your team of test results, for example, sending an email, posting a message to a Slack workspace, creating an issue in JIRA, as well as integrating with other team workflow tools.
Test Lab support appears in version 3.2.0 of the firebase-functions node module. Be sure to read the documentation to get more details for Test Lab triggers, and use the API reference to discover all the information available in the test matrix results. There is also a quickstart and sample code available in GitHub to help you get started. For discussion, join the Test Lab engineering team in the #test-lab channel on the Firebase Slack.
This week, we’re returning to Google I/O for the 4th year in a row to share how we’re making Firebase better for all app developers, from the smallest one-person startup to the largest enterprise businesses. No matter how many times we take the stage, our mission remains the same: to help mobile and web developers succeed by making it easier to build, improve, and grow your apps. Since launching Firebase as Google’s mobile development platform at I/O 2016, we’ve been continuously amazed at what you’ve built with our tools. It is an honor to help you on your journey to change the world!
For example, in Uganda, a start-up called Teheca is using Firebase to reduce the mortality rate of infants and new mothers by connecting parents with nurses for post-natal care. Over in India where smartphones are quickly replacing TVs as the primary entertainment source, Hotstar, India’s largest video streaming app, is using Firebase with BigQuery to transform the viewing experience by making it more social and interactive. Here’s how they’re doing it, in their own words:
Stories like these inspire us to keep making Firebase better. In fact, we’ve released over 100 new features and improvements over the last 6 months! Read on to learn about our biggest announcements at Google I/O 2019.
New translation, object detection and tracking, and AutoML capabilities in ML Kit
Last year, we launched ML Kit, bringing Google's machine learning expertise to mobile developers in a powerful, yet easy-to-use package. It came with a set of ready-to-use on-device and cloud-based APIs with support for custom models, so you could apply the power of machine learning to your app, regardless of your familiarity with ML. Over the past few months, we’ve expanded on these by adding solutions for Natural Language Processing, such as Language Identification and Smart Reply APIs. Now, we’re launching three more capabilities in beta: On-device Translation API, Object Detection & Tracking API, and AutoML Vision Edge.
The On-device Translation API allows you to use the same offline models that support Google Translate to provide fast, dynamic translation of text in your app into 58 languages. The Object Detection & Tracking API lets your app locate and track, in real-time, the most prominent object in a live camera feed. With AutoML Vision Edge, you can easily create custom image classification models tailored to your needs. For example, you may want your app to be able to identify different types of food, or distinguish between species of animals. Whatever your need, just upload your training data to the Firebase console and you can use Google’s AutoML technology to build a custom TensorFlow Lite model for you to run locally on your user's device. And if you find that collecting training datasets is hard, you can use our open source app which makes the process simpler and more collaborative.
Customers like IKEA, Fishbrain, and Lose It! are already using ML Kit’s capabilities to enhance their app experiences. Here’s what they had to say:
"We’re working with Google Cloud to create a new mobile experience that enables customers, wherever they are, to take photos of home furnishing and household items and quickly find that product or similar in our online catalogue. The Cloud Vision Product Search API provided IKEA a fast and easy way to index our catalogue, while ML Kit’s Object Detection and Tracking API let us seamlessly implement the feature on a live viewfinder on our app. Google Cloud helps us make use of Vision Product Search and we are very excited to explore how this can help us create a better and more convenient experience for our customers.” - Susan Standiford, Chief Technology Officer of Ingka Group, a strategic partner in the IKEA franchise system and operating IKEA in 30 markets.
“Our users are passionate about fishing, so capturing and having access to images of catches and species information is central to their experience. Through AutoML Vision Edge, we’ve increased the number of catches logged with species information by 30%, and increased our species recognition model accuracy from 78% to 88%..”- Dimitris Lachanas, Android Engineering Manager at Fishbrain
“Through AutoML Vision Edge, we were able to create a highly predictive, on-device model from scratch. With this improvement to our state-of-the-art food recognition algorithm, Snap It, we’ve increased the number of food categories our customers can classify in images by 21% while reducing our error rate by 36%, which is huge for our customers.” - Will Lowe Ph.D., Director of Data Science & AI, Lose It!
Performance Monitoring now supports web apps
Native mobile developers have loved using Firebase Performance Monitoring to find out what parts of their app are running slower than they expect, and for which app users. Today, we’re excited to announce that Performance Monitoring is available for web apps too, in beta, so web developers can understand how real users are experiencing their app in the wild.
By pasting a few lines of code to their site, the Performance Monitoring dashboard will track and visualize high level web metrics (like page load and network stats) as well as more granular metrics (like time to first paint and first input delay) across user segments. The Performance Monitoring dashboard will also give you the ability to drill down into these different user segments by country, browser, and more. Now, you can get deep insight into the speed and performance of your web apps and fix issues fast to ensure your end users have a consistently great experience. By adding web support to one of our most popular tools, we’re reaffirming our commitment to make app development easier for both mobile and web developers.
Brand new audience builder in Google Analytics for Firebase
Google Analytics for Firebase provides free, unlimited, and robust analytics so you can measure the things that matter in your app and understand your users. A few weeks ago, we announced advanced filtering in Google Analytics for Firebase, which allows you to filter your Analytics event reports by any number of different user properties or audiences at the same time.
Today, we’re thrilled to share that we’ve completely rebuilt our audience system from scratch with a new interface. This new audience builder includes new features like sequences, scoping, time windows, membership duration, and more to enable you to create dynamic, precise, and fresh audiences for personalization (through Remote Config) or re-engagement (through Cloud Messaging and/or the new App campaigns).
For example, if you wanted to create a "Coupon users" audience based on people who redeem a coupon code within your app, and then complete an in-app purchase within 20 minutes, this is now possible with the new audience builder.
In addition to the three big announcements above, we’ve also made the following improvements to other parts of Firebase.
Support for collection group queries in Cloud Firestore
In January, we graduated Cloud Firestore - our fully-managed NoSQL database - out of beta into general availability with lower pricing tiers and new locations. Now, we’ve added support for Collection Group queries. This allows you to search for fields across all collections of the same name, no matter where they are in the database. For example, imagine you had a music app which stored its data like so:
This data structure makes it easy to query the songs by a given artist. But until today, it was impossible to query across artists — such as finding the longest songs regardless of who wrote them. With collection group queries, Cloud Firestore now can perform these searches across all song documents, even though they're in different collections. This means it’s easier to organize your data hierarchically, while still being able to search for the documents you want.
Cloud Functions emulator
We’ve also been steadily improving our tools and emulator suite to increase your productivity for local app development and testing. In particular, we’re releasing a brand new Cloud Functions emulator that can also communicate with the Cloud Firestore emulator. So if you want to build a function that triggers upon a Firestore document update and writes data back to the database you can code and test that entire flow locally on your laptop, for much faster development.
Configurable velocity alerts in Crashlytics
Firebase Crashlytics helps you track, prioritize, and solve stability issues that erode app quality, in real time. One of the most important alerts within Crashlytics is the velocity alert, which notifies you when an issue suddenly increases in severity and impacts a significant percentage of your users. However, we recognize that every app is unique and the one-size-fits-all alerting threshold might not be what’s best for you and your business. That’s why you can now customize velocity alerts and determine how often and when you want to be alerted about changes to your app’s stability. We’re also happy to announce that we’ve expanded Crashlytics to include Unity and NDK support.
Improvements to Test Lab
Firebase Test Lab makes it easy for you to test your app on real, physical devices, straight from your CLI or the Firebase console. Over the past few months, we’ve released a number of improvements to Test Lab. We’ve expanded the types of apps you can run tests on by adding support for Wear OS by Google and Android App Bundles. We’ve also added ML vision to Test Lab’s monkey action feature so we can more intelligently simulate where users will tap in your app or game. Lastly, we’ve made your tests more reliable with test partitioning, flaky test detection, and the robo action timeline, which tells you exactly what the crawler was doing while the test was running.
Greater control over Firebase project permissions
Security and data privacy remain part of our top priorities. We want to make sure you have control over who can access your Firebase projects, which is why we’ve leveraged Google Cloud Platform’s Identity & Access Management controls to give you finer grained permission controls. Right from the Firebase console, you can control who has access to which parts of your Firebase project. For example, you can grant access to a subset of tools so team members who run notification campaigns aren’t able to change your Firebase database’s security rules. You can go even further and use the GCP console to create custom roles permitting access to only the actions your team members are required to take.
More open-sourced SDKs
To make Firebase more usable and extensible, we’re continuing to open source our SDKs and accepting contributions from the community. We are committed to giving you transparency and flexibility with the code you integrate into your mobile and web apps. Most recently, we open sourced our C++ SDK.
In case you missed the news at Cloud Next 2019, here’s a quick recap of the updates we unveiled back in April:
In addition to making Firebase more powerful, we’ve also been hard at work bringing the best of Fabric into Firebase. We know many of you have been waiting for more information on this front, so we have outlined our journey in more detail here.
We’re continuing to invest in Firebase and as always, we welcome your feedback! With every improvement to Firebase, we aim to simplify your app development workflows and infrastructure needs, so you can stay focused on building amazing user experiences. To get a sneak peek at what’s next, join our Alpha program and help us shape the future
It's December, folks, and you know what that means: holiday cheer!
The Firebase Test Lab team is fully invested in making this season the greatest of seasons. Remember Halloween? What a hoot! Also, this happened:
(Note: these are actual Test Lab engineers, in costume, actually beating each other up with foam sticks at a Halloween party. Both get lumps of coal this year.)
We're getting ready for the holidays! So, sit back, pour yourself some eggnog, and read about what's new for your Android testing enjoyment.
Many of you are using Robo to automatically test your apps in Test Lab. Since you don't have to write any code to make it work, it's the gift that keeps on giving. Even better, you can have it fill in specific form fields and push buttons with some easy configuration.
We've found that some apps require more of a nudge to navigate into the parts that need the most testing. (Hey, even Santa needs help from a few elves!) Now, with Robo scripts, you can record a series of actions to take in your app, and play that back before Robo takes over. It works a lot like Espresso Test Recorder, except the output is a JSON file that you upload along with your APK when running a Robo test. With these extra instructions, you can guide your app past introductions or login screens.
Of course, your best bet to maximize the test coverage is writing Espresso tests that drive your app. I heard that it's easier than driving a team of reindeer!
Do you use the screenshots in Test Lab results to check if your app displays correctly? It's a great way to see if you app renders "naughty or nice" on many different types of screens. But if you test with lots of devices in a single test matrix, it can be kind of a pain to sort through all the results to compare the same screen among multiple devices. Now, Test Lab will cluster them together in your test results, so you can see all the different screen sizes, densities, and orientations from your test in a single place.
The Test Lab team is always busy at the North Pole (located at a data center in Atlanta) bringing you new devices to test with. The latest additions are the Sony Xperia XZ Premium, the Moto G4 Play, and the Huawei P8lite, delivered straight to your digital stocking. However, sometimes old toys break and need to be recycled. At the Test Lab workshop, we call that "device deprecation", which means we take old devices out of commission as they become unreliable. To see a (twice-checked) list of devices that are currently available, in addition to those being deprecated, click through to this page. Once a device is marked as "deprecated", it'll remain available for a month, then removed.
Deprecated devices look like this in the Firebase console:
And like this in the gcloud command line (note the "deprecated" tag in red):
You better not pout, you better not cry ‐ these devices served longer than their expected lifetime!
Or, just join us on the Firebase Slack in the #test-lab channel. We're all friendly there, so be good, for goodness sake!
Sometimes the worst bugs to track down are the ones that seem to be impossible to reproduce. Or worse, inconsistent performance problems that can cause "Application Not Responding" errors in Android apps. No matter how much test code you write, these types of errors seem to have a way of sneaking into your app and causing problems for your users. However, with some clever use of Android's StrictMode API, alongside Firebase Test Lab for Android, you can find out about these problems before they reach production!
Over the years since Android was first available, a number of best practices have been observed for writing solid apps. For example, you shouldn't be performing blocking I/O on the main thread, and you shouldn't store references to Activity objects that are held after the Activity is destroyed. While it's likely that no one will force you to observe these practices (and you may never see a problem during development), enabling StrictMode in your app will let you know where you've made a mistake. These are called "policy violations", and you configure these policies with code in your app.
Personally, I don't want any of my code to cause any StrictMode violations. In fact, I'd like to consider them bugs that are just as serious as a regular crash, because they could crash my app in some cases! And, in fact, I can configure all StrictMode violations to crash the app. The Java code for that looks like this:
private static final StrictMode.ThreadPolicy FATAL_THREAD_POLICY = new StrictMode.ThreadPolicy.Builder() .detectAll() .penaltyLog() .penaltyDeath() .build(); private static final StrictMode.VmPolicy FATAL_VM_POLICY = new StrictMode.VmPolicy.Builder() .detectAll() .penaltyLog() .penaltyDeath() .build(); public static void enableFatalStrictMode() { if (shouldEnableFatalStrictMode()) { StrictMode.setThreadPolicy(FATAL_THREAD_POLICY); StrictMode.setVmPolicy(FATAL_VM_POLICY); } }
Here I have both a ThreadPolicy (for the main thread) and a VmPolicy (for the entire app) that look for all known violations, and will both log that violation and crash the app. Take a look through the javadoc for those builders to learn about all the situations they can catch.
Also notice that I'm enabling the policies conditionally. You probably don't want an accidental violation to crash on your users in production, so the method shouldEnableFatalStrictMode() typically looks like this, which activates it for your debug builds only:
shouldEnableFatalStrictMode()
private static boolean shouldEnableFatalStrictMode() { return BuildConfig.DEBUG; }
What I'd like to do is take this further and have StrictMode crash my app also when it's running in Firebase Test Lab. This is handy because the crash will fail the test, and I'll get a report about that in the test results. For that to happen, I can change the method to query a system setting on the device that's unique to devices in Test Lab. Note that this requires an Android Context to obtain a ContentResolver:
private static boolean shouldEnableFatalStrictMode() { ContentResolver resolver = context.getContentResolver(); String isInTestLab = Settings.System.getString(resolver, "firebase.test.lab"); return BuildConfig.DEBUG || "true".equals(isInTestLab); }
Now, my instrumented tests (and the automated Robo test) will crash with any StrictMode violations, and I'll see those very clearly in my Test Lab report. Here's an app that crashed in Test Lab with a StrictMode violation during a Robo test:
This doesn't tell you exactly what happened, though. Digging into the logs in the test report, I see the details of the violation right before the crash:
D/StrictMode(6996): StrictMode policy violation; ~duration=80 ms: android.os.StrictMode$StrictModeDiskReadViolation: policy=327743 violation=2 D/StrictMode(6996): at android.os.StrictMode$AndroidBlockGuardPolicy.onReadFromDisk(StrictMode.java:1415) D/StrictMode(6996): at java.io.UnixFileSystem.checkAccess(UnixFileSystem.java:251) D/StrictMode(6996): at java.io.File.exists(File.java:807) D/StrictMode(6996): at android.app.ContextImpl.getDataDir(ContextImpl.java:2167) D/StrictMode(6996): at android.app.ContextImpl.getPreferencesDir(ContextImpl.java:498) D/StrictMode(6996): at android.app.ContextImpl.getSharedPreferencesPath(ContextImpl.java:692) D/StrictMode(6996): at android.app.ContextImpl.getSharedPreferences(ContextImpl.java:360) D/StrictMode(6996): at android.content.ContextWrapper.getSharedPreferences(ContextWrapper.java:167) D/StrictMode(6996): at com.google.firebasesandbox.MainActivity.onCreate(MainActivity.java:25) D/StrictMode(6996): at android.app.Activity.performCreate(Activity.java:6982) D/StrictMode(6996): at android.app.Instrumentation.callActivityOnCreate(Instrumentation.java:1213) D/StrictMode(6996): at android.app.ActivityThread.performLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:2770) D/StrictMode(6996): at android.app.ActivityThread.handleLaunchActivity(ActivityThread.java:2892) D/StrictMode(6996): at android.app.ActivityThread.-wrap11(Unknown Source:0) D/StrictMode(6996): at android.app.ActivityThread$H.handleMessage(ActivityThread.java:1593) D/StrictMode(6996): at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:105) D/StrictMode(6996): at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:164) D/StrictMode(6996): at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:6541) D/StrictMode(6996): at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Native Method) D/StrictMode(6996): at com.android.internal.os.Zygote$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(Zygote.java:240) D/StrictMode(6996): at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:767)
So we've discovered here that an activity's onCreate() called getSharedPreferences(), and this method ends up reading the device filesystem. Blocking the main thread like this could be the source of some jank in the app, so it's worth figuring out a good way to move that I/O to another thread.
onCreate()
getSharedPreferences()
Now we have a way to check for StrictMode violations during a test, but there's still a few more details to work out.
If you do this immediately when the app launches (in an Application subclass or a ContentProvider), there is a subtle bug in some versions of Android that may need to be worked around in order to avoid losing your StrictMode policies when the first Activity appears.
There might be some times when you know there is a violation, but you can't fix the code right away for whatever reason (for example, it's in a library you don't control). In that case, you might want to temporarily suspend the crashing behavior and simply log it instead. To temporarily suspend the crash, you can define a couple other non-fatal policies and swap them in where you know there's an issue to ignore:
private static final StrictMode.ThreadPolicy NONFATAL_THREAD_POLICY = new StrictMode.ThreadPolicy.Builder() .detectAll() .penaltyLog() .build(); private static final StrictMode.VmPolicy NONFATAL_VM_POLICY = new StrictMode.VmPolicy.Builder() .detectAll() .penaltyLog() .build(); public static void disableStrictModeFatality() { StrictMode.setThreadPolicy(NONFATAL_THREAD_POLICY); StrictMode.setVmPolicy(NONFATAL_VM_POLICY); }
Similarly, you may not want to track all the possible violations all the time. In that case, you might want to instruct the policy builder to only detect a subset of the potential issues.
While StrictMode violations are not always the worst thing for your users, I've always found it educational to enable StrictMode in order to find out where my app might be causing problems. In combination with Firebase Test lab, it's a great tool for maximizing the quality of your app.
Testing your application is a great way to help maximize its quality, and many of you know that Firebase Test Lab for Android has some useful tools for testing Android apps. If you're the type of engineer who likes to maximize test coverage by writing instrumented tests (and regular unit tests), you can send those to Test Lab for execution. Even if you don't like writing tests, you have some options. You can record instrumented tests by interacting with your app using Espresso Test Recorder in Android Studio. And there's almost no effort required at all to run a Robo test that automatically crawls your app.
These tests are helpful for data-driven apps because there are robust test frameworks that understand how to navigate the Android platform widgets used to receive input and display data on screen. However, most games don't work with platform widgets. Games typically take over the screen using their own UI elements, and provide their own touch controls. As a result, it's extremely difficult to write instrumented tests for testing games, and Robo test won't know how to navigate the game at all.
To help deal with these challenges with testing games, the Test Lab team has come up with a way for game developers to test their games effectively across many of the devices that Test Lab offers. It's a new type of test called a Game Loop Test, and it's available today in beta.
If you've seen arcade video games operate, you know that they're always showing something on screen, typically some automated demo of the game, called "attract mode". With Firebase Test Lab, game developers can now use this concept of attract mode to construct test scenarios, and Test Lab will arrange for those scenarios to be invoked in sequence. This gives developers the opportunity to test a wide variety of game levels and situations in a single test run on all the devices provided by Test Lab. If there are any problems with a scenario, you'll find out which ones are problematic, so you can focus your efforts on improving that specific case.
Even better, Test Lab now provides performance data with every report. Of particular interest to game developers is a graph of the rendered frame rate over time throughout the test, tied to a video of the device display. This helps you quickly identify the parts of your game that aren't rendering at an acceptable FPS.
In addition to FPS, there are other performance metrics available for all apps. You'll be able to see your app's CPU utilization, memory usage, and network ingress and egress. Notice how you can jump directly to the point in the video where you're observing performance problems.
If you're a game developer, now is a great time to check out Firebase Test Lab for Android to see what it can do to help the quality of your game.
Our goal with Firebase is to help developers build better apps and grow them into successful businesses. Six months ago at Google I/O, we took our well-loved backend-as-a-service (BaaS) and expanded it to 15 features to make it Google’s unified app development platform, available across iOS, Android, and the web.
We launched many new features at Google I/O, but our work didn’t stop there. Since then, we’ve learned a lot from you (750,000+ projects created on Firebase to date!) about how you’re using our platform and how we can improve it. Thanks to your feedback, today we’re launching a number of enhancements to Crash Reporting, Analytics, support for game developers and more. For more information on our announcements, tune in to the livestream video from Firebase Dev Summit in Berlin. They’re also listed here:
Often the hardest part about fixing an issue is reproducing it, so we’ve added rich context to each crash to make the process simple. Firebase Crash Reporting now shows Firebase Analytics event data in the logs for each crash. This gives you clarity into the state of your app leading up to an error. Things like which screens of your app were visited are automatically logged with no instrumentation code required. Crash logs will also display any custom events and parameters you explicitly log using Firebase Analytics. Firebase Crash Reporting works for both iOS and Android apps.
Glide, a popular live video messaging app, relies on Firebase Crash Reporting to ensure user quality and release agility. “No matter how much effort you put into testing, it will never be as thorough as millions of active users in different locations, experiencing a variety of network conditions and real life situations. Firebase allows us to rapidly gain trust in our new version during phased release, as well as accelerate the process of identifying core issues and providing quick solutions.” - Roi Ginat, Founder, Glide.
We want to help you deliver high-quality experiences, so testing your app before it goes into the wild is incredibly important. Firebase Test Lab allows you to easily test your app on many physical and virtual devices in the cloud, without writing a single line of test code. Beginning today, developers on the Spark service tier (which is free!) can run five tests per day on physical devices and ten tests per day on virtual devices—with no credit card setup required. We’ve also heard that you want more device options, so we’ve added 11 new popular Android device models to Test Lab, available today.
We know that your data is most actionable when you can see and process it as quickly as possible. Therefore, we’re announcing a number of features to help you maximize the potential of your analytics events:
We were happy to give you a sneak preview at the Firebase Dev Summit of a new feature we are now building, StreamView, which will offer a live, dynamic view of your analytics data as it streams in.
To further enhance your targeting options, we’ve improved the connection between Firebase Analytics and other Firebase features, such as Dynamic Links and Remote Config. For example, you can now use Dynamic Links on your Facebook business page, and we can identify Facebook as a source in Firebase Analytics reporting. Also, you can now target Remote Config changes by User Properties, in addition to Audiences.
Game developers are building great apps, and we want Firebase to work for you, too. We’ve built an entirely new plugin for Unity that supports Analytics, the Realtime Database, Authentication, Dynamic Links, Remote Config, Notifications and more. We've also expanded our C++ SDK with Realtime Database support.
FirebaseUI is a library that provides common UI elements when building apps, and it’s a quick way to integrate with Firebase. FirebaseUI 1.0 includes a drop-in UI flow for Firebase Authentication, with common identity providers such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter. FirebaseUI 1.0 also added features such as client-side joins and intersections for the Realtime Database, plus integrations with Glide and SDWebImage that make downloading and displaying images from Firebase Storage a cinch. Follow our progress or contribute to our Android, iOS, and Web components on Github.
We want to provide the best tool for developers, but it’s also important that we give resources and training to help you get more out of the platform. As such, we’ve created a new Udacity course: Firebase in a Weekend! It’s an instructor-led video course to help all developers get up and running with Firebase on iOS and Android, in two days.
Finally, to help wrap your head around all our announcements, we’ve created a new demo app. This is an easy way to see how Analytics, Crash Reporting, Test Lab, Notifications, and Remote Config work in a live environment, without having to write a line of code.
Helping developers build better apps and successful businesses is at the core of Firebase. We work hard on it every day. We love hearing your feedback and ideas for new features and improvements—and we hope you can see from the length of this post that we take them to heart! Follow us on Twitter, join our Slack channel, participate in our Google Group, and let us know what you think. We’re excited to see what you’ll build next!
At Google, we understand how important the quality of your application is in order to grow your user base, increase customer satisfaction and boost your revenues. When we took a closer look at data from 1-star reviews on Google Play, we observed that more than 50% of these reviews are related to bugs and crashes in the app.
For many developers, finding and resolving these problems prior to release can be very challenging. As the Android ecosystem continues to grow rapidly, it can be a daunting task to maintain a high quality, performant app that scales well for your users. As your user base grows, you may only have access to a handful of devices to use for testing. Accessing devices that are unavailable in your country is also difficult. Moreover, setting up a proper testing infrastructure that facilitates pre-release testing is a very expensive and time-consuming process that requires continual maintenance.
To help streamline the testing of mobile applications, we’re introducing Firebase Test Lab for Android, a platform where you can automate testing with the same tools that Google uses to test its own products. With a few easy steps, you can launch your tests on our physical devices to help ensure the best possible quality for your applications.
Testing Android applications normally involves writing instrumentation tests to script the interactions with the app. If you’ve already written tests using Espresso, UI Automator 2.0, or Robotium, you can begin running those tests today on devices hosted by Firebase Test Lab.
Authoring instrumentation tests is easier now with Android Studio 2.2 (or newer) using the new Espresso Test Recorder tool. All you have to do is launch your app in recording mode, and the test recorder will observe and remember all your interactions with the app, then generate test code in Espresso that duplicates those interactions. You can then turn around and run these tests in Firebase Test Lab.
Even if you’re not writing your own tests, you can still use Firebase Test Lab. We have a fully automated, intelligent test called a Robo test that will crawl your app by performing interactions with your app’s user interface. You don’t have to write a single line of code to gain the benefits of this automated coverage.
With each test you run, you will select from a variety of device manufacturers and models, Android versions, and configurations (Virtual devices are also now available as a beta offering). Firebase Test Lab will then run your tests on multiple devices simultaneously to satisfy your selections as quickly as possible. When the tests are complete, the results from the test will be stored in your Firebase project.
Testing works best when it happens throughout the development process, not just before you publish your app on Google Play. To simplify this process, Firebase Test Lab gives you the ability to invoke tests directly from within the tools you’re already using, such as Android Studio and the Firebase Console. Our command-line interface allows you to run your tests through your continuous integration setup. Additionally, after you opt-in to receive the pre-launch report in the Google Play Developer Console, every new version of an app you publish to an Alpha or Beta channel will receive a free, five minute Robo test. These test results will become visible in the Play Store Developer Console.
The Play pre-launch report generated from running the Robo tests is currently available at no cost! For more customized testing using Firebase Test Lab, customers on the Blaze Billing Plan will be charged $5 per physical device hour, and after October 1st, 2016, $1 per virtual device hour. Prior to that, virtual devices are available at no charge. See our pricing page for details.
Running your first test on Firebase Test Lab is easy. You can follow our step-by-step codelab which walks you through various scenarios for running your first test. You can refer to our full documentation here. If you have questions or encounter any issues, please ask in the Firebase Google group.
Happy testing!
Eighteen months ago, Firebase joined Google. Since then, our backend-as-a-service (BaaS) that handles the heavy lifting of building an app has grown from a passionate community of 110,000 developers to over 450,000.
Our current features -- Realtime Database, User Authentication, and Hosting -- make app development easier, but there’s more we can do, so today, we’re announcing a major expansion!
Firebase is expanding to become a unified app platform for Android, iOS and mobile web development. We’re adding new tools to help you develop faster, improve app quality, acquire and engage users, and monetize apps. On top of this, we’re launching a brand new analytics product that ties everything together, all while staying true to the guiding principles we’ve had from the beginning:
Firebase Analytics is our brand new, free and unlimited analytics solution for mobile apps. It benefits from Google’s experience with Google Analytics, and features some new capabilities for apps:
Firebase Analytics is user and event-centric and gives you insight into what your users are doing in your app. You can also see how your paid advertising campaigns are performing with cross-network attribution, which tells you where your users are coming from. You can see all of this from a single dashboard.
Firebase Analytics is also integrated with other Firebase offerings to provide a single source of truth for in-app activity and through a feature called Audiences. Audiences let you define groups of users with common attributes. Once defined, these groups can be accessed from other Firebase features -- to illustrate, we’ll reference Audiences throughout this post.
To help you build better apps, our suite of backend services is expanding.
Google Cloud Messaging, the most popular cloud-to-device push messaging service in the world, is integrating with Firebase and changing its name to Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM). Available for free and for unlimited usage, FCM supports messaging on iOS, Android, and the Web, and is heavily optimized for reliability and battery-efficiency. It’s built for scale and already sends 170 billion messages per day to two billion devices.
One of our most requested features is the ability to store images, videos, and other large files. We’re launching Firebase Storage so developers can easily and securely upload and download such files. Firebase Storage is powered by Google Cloud Storage, giving it massive scalability and allowing stored files to be easily accessed by Google Cloud projects. The Firebase Storage client SDKs have advanced logic to gracefully handle poor network conditions.
Firebase Remote Config gives you instantly-updatable variables that you can use to tune and customize your app on the fly to deliver the best experience to your users. You can enable or disable features or change the look and feel without having to publish a new version. You can also target configurations to specific Firebase Analytics Audiences so that each of your users has an experience that’s tailored for them.
In addition, we’re continuing to invest heavily in our existing backend products, Firebase Realtime Database, Firebase Hosting, and Firebase Authentication. Authentication has seen the biggest updates, with brand new SDKs, and an upgraded backend infrastructure. This provides added security, reliability, and scale using the same technologies that power Google’s own accounts. We’ve also added new Authentication features including email verification and account linking. For Hosting, custom domain support is now free for all developers, and the Database has a completely rebuilt UI. We’re working hard on other great Realtime Database features, stay tuned for those.
We’re adding two new offerings to Firebase to help you deliver higher quality apps.
When your app crashes, it’s bad for your users and it hurts your business. Firebase Crash Reporting gives you prioritized, actionable reports to help you diagnose and fix problems in your iOS or Android app after it has shipped. We’ve also connected Crash Reporting to Audiences in Firebase Analytics, so you can tell if users on a particular device, in a specific geography, or in any other custom segment are experiencing elevated crash rates.
Cloud Test Lab, announced last year at Google I/O, is now Firebase Test Lab for Android. Test Lab helps you find problems in your app before your users do. It allows for both automatic and customized testing of your app on real devices hosted in Google data centers.
After you’ve launched your app, we can help you grow and re-engage users with five powerful growth features.
Firebase Notifications is a new UI built on top of the Firebase Cloud Messaging APIs that lets you easily deliver notifications to your users without writing a line of code. Using the Notifications console you can re-engage users, run marketing campaigns, and target messages to Audiences in Firebase Analytics.
Firebase Dynamic Links make URLs more powerful in two ways. First, they provide “durability” -- links persist across the app install process so users are taken to the right place when they first open your app. This “warm welcome” increases engagement and retention. Second, they allow for dynamically changing the destination of a link based on run-time conditions, such as the type of browser or device. Use them in web, email, social media, and physical promotions to gain insight into your growth channels.
Firebase Invites turns your customers into advocates. Your users can easily share referral codes or their favorite content via SMS or email to their network, so you can increase your app's reach and retention.
Firebase App Indexing, formerly Google App Indexing, brings new and existing users to your app from the billions of Google searches. If your app is already installed, users can launch it directly from the search results. New users are presented with a link to install your app.
AdWords, Google’s advertising platform for user acquisition and engagement, is now integrated with Firebase. Firebase can track your AdWords app installs and report lifetime value to the Firebase Analytics dashboard. Firebase Audiences can be used in AdWords to re-engage specific groups of users. In-app events can be defined as conversions in AdWords, to automatically optimize your ads, including universal app campaigns.
To help you generate revenue from your app and build a sustainable business, we’ve integrated Firebase with AdMob, an advertising platform used by more than 1 million apps. We’ve made it easier to get started with AdMob when you integrate the Firebase SDK into your app. Using AdMob, you can choose from the latest ad formats, including native ads, which help provide a great user experience.
Along with new feature launches, we’re moving our website and documentation to a new home: firebase.google.com.
We’re also launching a brand new console to manage your app. It is completely redesigned and rebuilt for improved ease of use, and we’ve deeply integrated it with other Google offerings, like Google Cloud and Google Play.
Firebase now uses the same underlying account system as Google Cloud Platform, which means you can use Cloud products with your Firebase app. For example, a feature of Firebase Analytics is the ability to export your raw analytics data to BigQuery for advanced querying. We’ll continue to weave together Cloud and Firebase, giving you the functionality of a full public cloud as you grow.
You can also link your Firebase account to Google Play from our new console. This allows data, like in-app purchases, to flow to Firebase Analytics, and ANRs (application not responding) to flow to Firebase Crash Reporting, giving you one place to check the status of your app.
Finally, we’re announcing the beta launch of a new C++ SDK. You can find the documentation and getting started guides here.
We’re excited to announce that most of these new products, including Analytics, Crash Reporting, Remote Config, and Dynamic Links, are free for unlimited usage.
For our four paid products: Test Lab, Storage, Realtime Database, and Hosting, we’re announcing simpler pricing. We now offer:
Many things are changing, but Firebase’s core principles remain the same. We care deeply about providing a great developer experience through easy-to-use APIs, intuitive interfaces, comprehensive documentation, and tight integrations. We’re committed to cross-platform development for iOS, Android, and the Web, and when you run into trouble, we’ll provide support to help you succeed.
If you were using a Firebase feature before today -- like the Realtime Database, GCM, or App Indexing -- there’s no impact on your app. We’ll continue to support you, though we recommend upgrading to the latest SDK to access our new features.
As far as we’ve come, this is still early days. We’ll continue to refine and add to Firebase. For example, the JavaScript SDK does not yet support all the new features. We’re working quickly to close gaps, and we’d love to hear your feedback so we can improve. You can help by requesting a feature.
All the new features are ready-to-go, and already in use by apps like Shazam, SkyScanner, PicCollage, and more. Get started today by signing up, visiting our new site, or reading the documentation to learn more.
We can’t wait to hear what you think!
