Google has announced that its Firebase client libraries, for developers creating realtime apps for iOS, Android and the web, are being open sourced, and that Firebase Analytics is getting new features. 

An enhanced version of Firebase was introduced at Google I/O 2016 as Google’s unified app development platform, encompassing mobile and web.  The latest announcements were made at Google I/O 2017. Alongside the move to make the SDKs open, Google announced it will be using GitHub as a core part of its own toolchain to make it possible for external developers to contribute.

The improvements to Firebase Analytics were announced along with the news that it will no longer be called Firebase Analytics; instead,  all app analytics reports will come under the Google Analytics brand, even those in the Firebase console. In practical terms, the analytics is now integrated with AdMob, so you can include revenue, impression and click data from AdMob with the rest of your event data collected by the Firebase SDK.

Report parameters are another area that has been improved with support for custom parameters. You can now register up to 50 custom event parameters and see their details in your Analytics reports. If you supply numeric parameters you’ll see a graph of the average and the sum of that parameter, while for text parameters you'll see a breakdown of the most popular values.

As with the rest of your Analytics reports, you can also apply Audience and User Property filters to your custom parameter reports to identify trends among different segments of your user base.

One improvement that's in beta is i integration with DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Bid Manager.

Away from the Analytics, the open source elements that have been announced so far are in the iOS, JavaScript, Java, Node.js and Python SDKs. Plans are underway to open source the Android SDK as well. For the iOS SDK, the Realtime Database, Auth, Cloud Storage and Cloud Messaging (FCM) SDKs are included, with more to follow. 

The JavaScript elements that have been open sourced so far are the Realtime Database, Cloud Storage and Cloud Messaging (FCM) SDKs for JavaScript. The developers say the Firebase Authentication will be added soon.

All three Admin SDKs for accessing Firebase on privileged environments are now fully open source, including the recently-launched Python SDK.

More Information

Firebase

Firebase on GitHub

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