Challenge

With over 110 million downloads globally, PicCollage struggled to scale while maintaining a "test-and-iterate" culture. Frequent deploys for A/B testing to publish new app configurations led to a high probability of technical errors and bugs. Sending and optimizing notifications to users was a manual process that involved coordinating across multiple time zones.

Solution

With Firebase, PicCollage has cut average experiment time by 50%, from two weeks to one. PicCollage controls A/B tests using Firebase Remote Config and analyzes results using Firebase Analytics — all in one console. By applying filters in Analytics, PicCollage is able to analyze split test changes by user segment and app version on iOS and Android.

PicCollage has revamped their global marketing process to send notifications with ease. Firebase Notifications allows PicCollage to schedule notification campaigns weeks in advance by time zone and device. They are now able to optimize campaign efficiency by using metrics automatically generated on notification delivery, including opens and in-app conversions.

Challenge

Fabulous aimed to create a personalized experience that could scale to millions of active users. They wanted to do this by creating customized workflows for exercise, dieting — healthy habits their users want to train. Fabulous needed an agile and iterative development process, allowing the app to be used in production while simultaneously releasing new experimental versions based on user feedback.

Solution

With Firebase Invites, Fabulous created a scalable onboarding experience, tailored to each user, in just a few hours. Fabulous users can now send personalized invitations to close friends, using an auto-generated list provided by Invites. Friends are immediately shown personalized content after installing the Fabulous app through the use of Dynamic Links. Friend referrals through Invites and Dynamic Links now account for 60% of Fabulous installs and have a ~2X higher retention than invites with generic links.

Initially, app users were confused by experimental features in the app and how to enable them. With Firebase Dynamic Links, Fabulous can drive specific users to the controlled test environment without a confusing sign-up flow, creating a frictionless experience.

To encourage healthy habits, Fabulous uses Firebase Notifications to push in-app behavioral intervention instructions to users. Because the notifications contain a large amount of text, Fabulous stores the messages using Firebase Remote Config. By storing hundreds of lines of data in Remote Config, they are able to work around message size constraints, such as Apple’s 2K limit on push notifications.

Fabulous needed to experiment continuously with new approaches, without disrupting the user experience. Implementing a controlled environment in the app delayed releases and consumed valuable development resources, often taking weeks to deploy. With Remote Config, Fabulous implemented a new onboarding flow to test in an afternoon, and no longer has to publish a new app update to move users between test environments. "The new onboarding appeared, to the excitement of the whole team. You had that feeling that something magical just happened, almost a guilt that all of this was too easy" said Sami Ben Hassine, Co-Founder and CEO at Fabulous.

Challenge

The travel booking experience is a highly personal process, so understanding and reacting to user behavior is critical for success. Skyscanner needed a new mobile back-end service to collect realtime ratings data and make constant improvements based on user feedback. Skyscanner was also planning innovative ways for users to share the app, as part of their app growth strategy.

Solution

Skyscanner replaced their legacy user ratings solution with Firebase Realtime Database in under 10 hours. Within two weeks of rolling out the service, Skyscanner had over 7,000 pieces of realtime feedback gathered through the app.

Skyscanner used Firebase Analytics as a powerful solution to get a holistic overview of user behavior, including how feedback activity in the app relates to other actions. "Firebase Analytics is already helping us better understand the different behavior patterns," said Viktor Páli, Mobile PM at Skyscanner. In less than a month after implementing, Skyscanner has data from more than 5 million monthly active users coming through Firebase Analytics.