January 2019 Summaries

Cloud Firestore has reached general availability, signaling Google’s confidence in its use for applications ranging from prototypes to mission-critical enterprise systems. General availability adds formal Google Cloud SLAs of 99.999% uptime for multi-region deployments and 99.99% for regional deployments, extends deprecation-policy coverage, and includes Firestore among HIPAA-compliant services. Google also announced regional-instance price reductions of up to 50%, effective automatically from March 3, 2019, while multi-region instances retain strongly consistent replicated storage across geographically separated data centers for higher resilience. New deployment locations in Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Americas aim to improve performance and help organizations meet local data-residency requirements. A new Firebase Console Usage tab, powered by Stackdriver and initially in beta, provides visibility into database reads, writes, and deletes and supports custom alerts to help developers monitor usage and manage costs.

Firebase’s dynamic audiences allow users to enter an audience when they meet defined event or user-property criteria and leave when they no longer qualify, addressing the earlier limitation in which membership was permanent. Audience conditions are largely evaluated on devices, so new audiences initially start empty, only capture qualifying events occurring after creation, and require current mobile SDK support. Developers can build audiences using user properties, event parameters, event counts within time windows, logical AND, OR, and exclusion rules, while membership duration determines how long users remain included without requalifying. Examples include segmenting users by fitness goals, recent long-distance runs, cart abandonment, app progression, or feature usage for targeted notifications, in-app messaging, Remote Config experiences, and advertising campaigns. Regular expressions can provide more flexible text matching but require care because Android and iOS use different underlying regex implementations.