March 2018 Summaries

Angular applications using Firebase authentication can become difficult to maintain when components combine sign-in actions, asynchronous redirect handling, user-state checks, and navigation logic, often leading to complex templates and dependencies. The example moves Google sign-in redirect processing from a login component’s initialization method into a reusable Angular Route Guard, where the guard checks AngularFireAuth for a redirect result and sends authenticated users to a profile route while allowing other visitors to continue to the requested route. By attaching the guard to selected routes through Angular Router configuration, the login component only needs to initiate the sign-in redirect, eliminating its Router dependency and separating route-specific behavior from component responsibilities.

Firebase Realtime Database integrates with Google Stackdriver Alerts to turn database monitoring metrics into automated, actionable notifications rather than relying solely on dashboards. Users can create alert policies for conditions such as database load exceeding 90% for more than one minute, optionally attaching documentation to help responders diagnose issues. Basic Stackdriver plans support email and Google Cloud Console mobile notifications, while premium plans add PagerDuty, Slack, and webhooks, which can trigger Cloud Functions for automated actions such as profiling a heavily loaded database and reporting results to Slack. Creating an alert involves using the Stackdriver Monitoring Console to define a policy, set metric thresholds and notification recipients, and save the policy to activate it.

Firebase announced several game-development updates at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, including Firebase Authentication support for Google Play Games Services, allowing Android players to sign in with existing GPGS credentials and access user-specific data through services such as Realtime Database and Cloud Storage. The company also introduced desktop development and testing support for C++ and Unity, covering Authentication, Realtime Database, Cloud Storage, and Remote Config, while clarifying that this support is not intended for publishing desktop games. Firebase highlighted its Predictions feature, which uses player behavior data to identify users likely to churn or make purchases, enabling targeted changes through Remote Config or notifications; Rockbite Studios reportedly increased revenue by 25% among predicted spenders and 24% among non-spenders using this approach. Firebase A/B Testing, built on Remote Config and Analytics, enables designers and analysts to run and evaluate in-game experiments through the Firebase console at no additional cost.

Firebase Remote Config introduced a REST API that lets developers retrieve and update configuration values programmatically rather than exclusively through the Firebase console, while mobile clients should continue using native SDKs to fetch those values. The two-call API supports custom internal tools with capabilities such as validating values and JSON, enforcing text limits, restricting which teams can alter particular settings, maintaining independent version histories, scheduling updates through cron jobs, batch-importing configurations from other systems, and changing app behavior automatically in response to server-side events through Cloud Functions. Available to all Firebase projects, the API is intended to make Remote Config more flexible for organizational workflows and automation.

Firebase updated its Blaze pay-as-you-go plan so that it includes free usage comparable to the Spark free plan, allowing Blaze users who remain within applicable limits to avoid monthly charges while retaining existing rates for usage above those limits. The Spark and Flame plans are unchanged, and Blaze users can now set project- or billing-level budgets and usage alerts through the Firebase Console to monitor spending. The change also makes it easier to use Google Cloud Platform services with the same payment method without forfeiting Firebase’s free usage. Some free-tier calculations differ between plans: Blaze allowances are generally measured daily rather than monthly, Cloud Functions limits apply across a billing account rather than individual projects, and Test Lab limits are based on daily device minutes rather than tests per day.

Firebase Crashlytics has graduated from beta to become Firebase’s default crash-reporting service, replacing Firebase Crash Reporting, which remained accessible through September 8, 2018 and was retired on September 9. Building on Crashlytics’ real-time crash tracking and prioritization capabilities, the release adds Analytics event breadcrumbs in the Firebase console, automated crash insights that identify common patterns and possible root causes, build pinning for highlighting important releases across teams, and a manual dSYM uploader for cases where automatic symbol-file uploads fail. Existing Firebase Crash Reporting data could still be accessed temporarily through the app picker, while users of both Fabric and Firebase could link their apps to view Fabric crash data in Firebase; Fabric-only users were not required to act immediately.