August 2020 Summaries

Brazilian game developer Tapps Games used Firebase tools to protect the stability of Vlogger Go Viral, a game with more than 11 million monthly active users, during a feature rollout. Rather than manually reviewing large volumes of negative feedback, the team enabled Firebase Crashlytics velocity alerts to detect increases in crash severity quickly, while custom keys and logs helped identify and track the conditions leading to failures. Tapps then used Firebase Remote Config to progressively disable the affected feature area and relied on staged Google Play releases to test the updated version with subsets of players before a full launch, aiming to improve crash-free user rates and player ratings.

Firebase Hosting has introduced Cloud Logging integration for server-side analytics, enabling developers to view and filter web request data such as visitor timing and location, response statuses, and request latency. Hosting now automatically applies Brotli compression when supported by users’ clients, reducing asset sizes, bandwidth usage, delivery times, and potentially hosting costs after the next deployment. The platform also adds internationalization rewrites that use its global CDN to serve language- and country-specific content, including localized 404 pages, through directory organization and Firebase configuration rather than relying on Cloud Functions redirects.

Google Analytics for Firebase now allows Android and iOS developers to manually log the protected screen_view event, giving them greater control over when screen visits are counted while preserving the option of automatic collection. Screen-view data supports app behavior reports, time spent on screens, and navigation path analysis, and manual logging can help capture only meaningful visits, track subsections or overlays such as support chats, and attach custom parameters. The update deprecates Android’s setCurrentScreen and iOS’s setScreenName methods, requiring developers who use custom screen names to log screen_view directly with optional screen_name and screen_class parameters. Automatic screen reporting can be disabled through platform-specific configuration, and manually logged events retain most parameters provided by automatic reporting, although iOS engagement_time_msec support was temporarily unavailable and reported through user_engagement instead. The change also resolves an iOS issue that had caused some automatically collected screen views to be logged twice.

Firebase reported that Unity 2020.1’s redesigned build system disrupted several Firebase Unity SDK integrations that depended on earlier build-process assumptions, affecting AndroidX and Jetifier configuration, transfer of google-services.json data, and Crashlytics-generated components, potentially causing launch crashes. While recommending Unity 2019 for the most reliable experience until an official fix is released, Firebase provided manual Gradle-based workarounds for Unity 2020.1: developers must generate custom Gradle templates, ensure Firebase’s generated google-services.xml resource is included, enable AndroidX and Jetifier in gradleTemplate.properties, and optionally force-resolve Android dependencies through External Dependency Manager for Unity. Most Firebase services, including Analytics, Remote Config, and Authentication, should then work, while Crashlytics requires additional project-level and launcher Gradle changes to add and apply its Gradle plugin. Firebase acknowledged the disruption, stated that it is developing a permanent solution and future process improvements, and directed developers with unresolved issues to its Unity GitHub repository or support channels.

Firebase Remote Config enables developers to alter app appearance and behavior without releasing updates, using templates that can now be managed programmatically through the Firebase Admin Node.js SDK starting with version 8.13.0. The new API provides an alternative to manual Firebase console changes and the REST API, supporting automated or server-side workflows such as scheduled updates and configuration imports. Developers can retrieve active templates, use ETags to prevent conflicting updates, add or modify conditions, parameters, and parameter groups, validate changes, and publish new active versions. Conditions are prioritized in descending order, so the first matching condition determines a parameter’s value when multiple conditions apply. The SDK also supports version management, including listing stored template versions, retrieving specific versions, and rolling back changes; Firebase retains up to 300 versions and deletes inactive versions older than 90 days.

Firebase Custom Authentication can integrate an existing identity provider such as Okta with Firebase services, allowing users authenticated through Okta to access Realtime Database, Cloud Firestore, Cloud Storage, and other Firebase features under consistent user identities and permissions. The approach uses a Node.js Express backend, deployable as a Cloud Function or elsewhere, to validate an Okta access token with Okta’s JWT verifier and exchange it for a Firebase custom token created through the Firebase Admin SDK using the Okta user ID. Setup requires configuring an Okta single-page application, trusted origins, a Firebase web project, and, for Cloud Functions deployments, appropriate Google Cloud service-account permissions. A simple web frontend uses Okta’s sign-in widget to obtain an access token, sends it to the protected token-exchange endpoint, and calls Firebase’s signInWithCustomToken method with the returned token. On first sign-in, Firebase creates a corresponding user record, after which Firebase authentication state listeners can update the interface and Firebase Security Rules can control access to protected resources; the same general pattern can be adapted for providers such as Auth0, Azure Active Directory, or custom identity systems.