Each year the Firebase Developer Summit takes place in another city in Europe. This year, Prague in the Czech Republic was the location where the Developer Summit was held.
Firebase Developer Summit is a free conference, where Google releases new Firebase tools. The conference starts with a keynote, and after the keynote, there will be multiple talks and workshops about Firebase tools.
I did attend the Firebase Summit for the second time. In this blog post I will share my learnings during the conference.
Create audiences to target people
With the new Firebase update, it is possible to create audiences. An audience in Firebase is a group of people that you can target by data that is sent by Analytics. For example, if you have a soccer app where you can watch news about soccer clubs, you can measure how often the user is reading news about each soccer club. If they read more than 5 articles for a soccer club, you can target them as an audience for that soccer club.
When you create audiences in Firebase, you are able to target them using Cloud Messaging, a push service from Firebase. For the example above with soccer clubs, it is possible to send extra push notifications about the soccer club because the user might be interested in that!
Improvements on BigQuery
It’s now possible to share data from Predictions, A/B testing and Crashlytics with BigQuery. This makes new situations possible, because in BigQuery you can bring data from Firebase and crashes together. If you log the email from a user, you are able to merge that with the crash list, so you have a list of emails from users that had a crash moment with your app. You can send them an mail with an excuse and promise improvement!
Long-running campaigns in Cloud Messaging
From now on, it’s possible to activate long-running campagnes in Firebase Cloud Messaging. When an event is triggered, you can schedule an event for a future moment.
For example, if a user registered (and this event is sent to Firebase Analytics), you can schedule a remote notification that should be delivered two weeks later, asking the user if he or she still likes your app. This may be very powerful for shopping apps, where you can schedule a push notification as soon as the user puts something in the shopping cart, but didn’t checkout.
User management
New in Firebase is user management, which allows you to give new users access to some of the Firebase services instead of the whole account. This can be useful if developers may only get access to crash data, but may not have access to analytics data.
User management is available under ‘settings’ and then ‘user and permissions’.
