At this week's Firebase Summit in Berlin Google announced a range of improvements for Firebase, its app development platform.

Firebase, a backend a service for developers creating realtime apps for iOS, Android and the web, which originated in 2011, joined Google in October 2014 as its a cloud-based Baas (backend as a service).

As we reported at the time, at this year's I/O event Google showcased a revamped version with improvements that make use of various Google developer tools such as Cloud Messaging.The latest round of enhancements strengthen Firebase as Google’s unified app development platform, encompassing mobile and web.

Alongside the improved analytics and gaming support, Firebase Crash Reporting is out of beta with a new feature designed to help you diagnose and reproduce app crashes. Firebase Crash Reporting now shows Firebase Analytics event data in the logs for each crash. You get data such as the screens users visited, along with any custom events and parameters you log using Firebase Analytics. Firebase Crash Reporting works for both iOS and Android apps.

Support for more devices has been added to Firebase Test Lab for Android, and a free tier has been added. Firebase Test Lab lets you test your app on many physical and virtual devices in the cloud. Developers on the free Spark service tier can run five tests per day on physical devices and ten tests per day on virtual devices.

The improvements to Firebase Analytics include live reporting, integration with Google Data Studio, and real-time exporting to BigQuery.

The better games support comes from a new plugin for Unity that supports Analytics, the Realtime Database, Authentication, Dynamic Links, Remote Config, and Notifications. The C++ SDK has also been expanded with Realtime Database support.

FirebaseUI has also been updated. This is a library with UI elements that you can use when creating apps, and it also provides a quick way to integrate with Firebase. The new version has a drop-in UI flow for Firebase Authentication, with common identity providers such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter. There's also new client-side joins and intersections for the Realtime Database, and it's easier to download and display images from Firebase Storage using new integrations with Glide and SDWebImage.

The video below is the keynote on Firebase from the Firebase Dev Summit in Berlin

More Information

Video From Firebase Dev Summit

Firebase Demo App

Firebase Site

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