The future of Fabric: unveiling our roadmap & migration flow

By Jason St. Pierre, Product Manager & Kristen Johnson, Product Lead for App Quality

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We’re beginning a new chapter with Firebase. Over the past few months, we’ve been working hard to bring the best of the Fabric and Firebase platforms together in a thoughtful way with the goal of giving you one central place to build, improve, and grow your apps. While we’ve kept you informed about our progress at events like Google I/O and Firebase Dev Summit, we wanted to take our commitment to transparency further so you can better prepare.

To that end, we have two big exciting announcements:

  1. You can begin migrating to Firebase.
    We’ve integrated the tools and features you love about Fabric (including our best-in-class crash reporter, Crashlytics) right into the Firebase console, and made many improvements to them capitalizing on Firebase’s strengths.

  2. We’re unveiling our migration roadmap.
    This roadmap is designed to give you full visibility into what we’re building, what we plan to launch next, and what actions we recommend you take.

We invite you to begin the journey to Firebase, your upgraded home, and check out our plans for the future!

Use the best of Fabric in Firebase

Firebase is Google’s mobile app development platform that helps you across the entire lifecycle of your app, with smart analytics embedded throughout. Now, it also includes your favorite Fabric tools.

For example, Crashlytics is now available in Firebase, where you can take advantage of new integrations that allow you to export your crash data for custom analysis in BigQuery, trigger workflows, and get insights into the events that led up to a crash. We’ve also evolved Digits into Firebase phone authentication so you can continue to authenticate users without issue. We’ve even added realtime metrics to the latest release section in Firebase, meaning you can continue to monitor your latest builds with confidence.

In the coming months, we’ll be bringing the functionality of Crashlytics Beta, the service you’ve used to distribute pre-release iOS and Android apps, to Firebase. We’ll keep you posted on our progress through the migration roadmap!

Access powerful new tools in Firebase

Not only does Firebase include the best of Fabric, it also offers you brand new capabilities that were not previously available on our platform. With Firebase, you can harness the power of machine learning, test your app on a variety of devices hosted on Google’s cloud, and group your users by their predicted behavior!

Firebase, like Fabric, makes app development faster, easier, and painless.

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Begin the migration to your new home

All Fabric customers can now start to migrate their app and teams to Firebase by going to their Fabric dashboard and clicking on the Firebase icon in the left-hand navigation. We recommend you begin this process soon so you can take advantage of all of the great things we are building for you over in Firebase!

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We’ve made the migration process as smooth as possible. It involves three main steps:

  1. Link your apps to Firebase

  2. Check out Crashlytics in Firebase and install the core Firebase SDK

  3. Invite your team to Firebase

Note: If you previously linked Answers to Firebase, you’ve already done part of the work. To fully migrate to Firebase, you’ll still need to complete this linking flow.

Get insight into the future of Fabric

We’ll continue to support Fabric until mid-2019, to give you plenty of time to migrate your apps and business to Firebase - but please plan your transition accordingly.

To stay up to date on the migration, check out our roadmap periodically, which sheds light on which products we’ve implemented in Firebase and what’s next.

Relive the Firebase party at WWDC18

by Brian Lynn, Firebase Party Host

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WWDC has drawn to a close and we wanted to share the photos of our party on the night of June 4th. It was great to meet and celebrate app development with many of you, including talented developers from Slack, Adidas, Coinbase, DJI and many more. We were blown away by your enthusiasm to come party with us!

Since we can’t travel back in time, here are some highlights so you can relive the night of fun.

The night begins!

We were excited to roll out the red carpet for our guests at the entrance. Our friendly hosts greeted everyone at the door, and we had food+drinks ready for you as soon as you finished checking in.

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Celebration time

To give The GlassHouse a homey feel, we designed the ambience of our event to resemble the look and feel of Firebase. Throughout the space, we added lighting in Firebase’s colors, custom pillows, video backdrop and more.

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A variety of passed hors d'oeuvre (with vegan options) were served throughout the night. We also designed three developer cocktails for the night: the Moscow ML, Old Functioned and Magarealtime. Thank you to all those who submitted creative names for our cocktails and congrats to the winners!

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The glowing selfie-station with nifty LED sunglasses was a favorite at this year's party. We’re glad that many of you loved the setup, took pictures, and shared them on social media!

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We also had fun playing our AppShip arcade game with many of you. Some of our hosts lost their voice cheering everyone on for that one, final goal of the night. And if you scored an own-goal, you weren't the only one: over half of the balls that went into the goal were last touched by someone from their own team.

Wrapping up the night

A party wouldn’t be complete without some great music and dancing. This year, we had a bigger dance floor with a giant disco ball as well as a talented DJ as usual. Those who didn’t feel like dancing and just wanted to relax, could do so at the outdoor terrace where you could get some fresh air and continue mingling.

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No party can last forever, and goodbyes are always hard. This year, Firebase branded travel mugs and bottle openers were waiting to go home with guests right at the door.

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Thank you to all those who joined us to celebrate app development - we were glad to share all the laughter with you. Check out our full photo album.

Here’s to next year!

From the Twitterverse:

We’re doing it again! Firebase party at WWDC18

by Brian Lynn, Firebase Party Host

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Heading to WWDC this year? Join us at the Firebase party on June 4th as we celebrate with the top iOS developers from around the world.

We’re excited to once again throw a party for our community at this year’s conference. If you’re going to be in town, join us for a night to mingle with other developers, meet engineers and product leads from the Fabric+Firebase team, and relax after the first day of WWDC.

We can’t wait to see you and toast to another exciting summer of mobile development.

  • When: Monday, June 4th, 2018
  • Time: 8:00pm - 12:00am
  • Where: The GlassHouse
  • Price: Free (!)

Tickets are limited so request your invite today! (Note: a confirmed ticket is required for entry)

New resources to help you with GDPR

by Mark Bouchard, Engineering Manager

On May 25th, the most significant piece of European data protection legislation in 20 years comes into effect: the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR.

We know that GDPR compliance is at the top of many of your minds, so we’re pleased to announce updated, GDPR-ready terms that include Data Processing and Security Terms. These Data Processing and Security Terms can help you out even if you aren’t in Europe, because the new regulations can govern the processing of personal data regardless of where it takes place. We believe data protection is important, so we have included it in our Terms of Service acceptance. You can accept these updated terms today by visiting your Fabric dashboard:

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Many organizations also need to specify a Data Processing Officer (DPO) or EU Representative, someone who ensures compliance with the regulations. You can enter your DPO’s details for your organization via your settings dashboard:

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We've also collected the answers to the questions you may need for your own compliance process, including information on the privacy and security certifications we have, the types of end-user information we process, and more. To learn more, see our new support guides for iOS or Android!

Cheers,

-


Link Fabric events to Firebase: do more with your data

Note: We're working on making updates to this feature. It is currently unavailable.

By Shobhit Chugh, Product Manager

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Most app teams collect data about their users to better serve them. But having data alone doesn’t automatically lead to insight. To be valuable, it needs to be processed, analyzed, and distilled into information that informs strategy and decision-making.

Answers, the analytics engine that powers Fabric, helps you understand your users by tracking events. Events are in-app actions (like login, social share, or purchase) that reveal how people interact with your app. This information is vital to learning how engaged users are, what actions they take most (and least), and how their behavior changes over time.

Today, we’re excited to give you more freedom to explore and examine your event data through a new Fabric events + Firebase integration. Now, all Fabric customers can unlock highly-requested analytics features in Firebase by creating and linking their Firebase account.
 

Fabric & Firebase are stronger together

Firebase is Google’s mobile platform that helps you build and grow high-quality apps without managing infrastructure. As we stated at Google I/O 2017, Fabric joined forces with Firebase because our two platforms are stronger together and offer complementary tools.

For instance, Fabric has always adhered to an opinionated philosophy and presented critical app data in a digestible way. However, we’ve heard from many of you that you want more flexibility. By teaming up with Firebase, we can build on the freedom and power that Firebase gives developers to do deeper analysis without compromising our opinionated approach.

This new Fabric events + Firebase integration allows you to use existing Fabric events with Firebase’s advanced marketing and analytics features to get more flexibility to organize, interpret, and act on your event data.
 

Build custom audiences to get deeper user insight

Although Fabric automatically groups your users into activity segments based on sessions, it’s interesting to group users by their behaviors too. With the Fabric events + Firebase integration, you can create custom audiences (a.k.a. user segments) in Firebase using your Fabric events and event attributes.

For example, you could create a “power users” audience to group people who have completed a key in-app action many times. For gaming apps, this group could consist of users who have who have completed at least 10 levels and made an in-app purchase.

With custom audiences, you can slice and dice your user data by in-app behavior to better understand engagement.

Firebase custom audiences


View historical data to unearth long-term trends

Fabric focuses on realtime events for the past 30 days, while Firebase gives you long-term visibility. Once you integrate Fabric events with Firebase, all event data that is collected from that point on will be accessible in Firebase. This extended view into your user behavior will help you uncover persisting trends.

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Combine different data sources into one view with custom analysis

The Fabric events + Firebase integration also gives you access to your raw data (something you’ve wanted for a long time!) so you can perform more sophisticated and targeted analysis. Specifically, when you complete the integration and link your Firebase project to BigQuery, your Fabric events will flow into a BigQuery dataset. BigQuery is a petabyte-scale analytics data warehouse that you can use to run SQL-like queries over vast amounts of data.

For example, if you track user events in multiple places (such as Fabric, Google Analytics 360, custom analytics collected by a mobile backend service), you can import and aggregate them from all of these sources in BigQuery to see a complete picture. From there, you can also use data visualization tools, like Data Studio, to turn this aggregated, raw data into informative reports that are easy to read, share, and customize.

In addition, this Fabric events + Firebase integration gives you the ability to manage permissions on projects and datasets so you have control over who is able to share, view, and retrieve your data.

BigQuery


Turning data into action

The Fabric events + Firebase integration gives you enhanced flexibility and control over your data. But what do you do after you’ve dissected, analyzed, and extracted meaning from it? How can you turn these insights into action?

By using these insights to trigger smart marketing campaigns.

Firebase provides tools like Cloud Messaging and Remote Config that can send messages and alter your app in response to Fabric events. For example, ecommerce apps can send a push notification with a discount code to all users who have made an in-app purchase to encourage them to buy something else. Or, ecommerce apps can enable “one-click checkout” for this group.


Tap into the power of Firebase in 3 steps

You can start the integration process right from your dashboard. Simply click the Firebase icon in your Fabric dashboard in the left navigation bar.

Firebase in Fabric nav

The integration only takes a few minutes and can be done by a developer in three simple steps:

  1. Link apps*
    *If you don’t have an existing Firebase account, don’t worry. We’ll walk you through setting one up.
  2. Upgrade the SDKs
  3. Ship your app

For more details on how to implement this, check out our technical docs for iOS and Android. This integration can be enabled with minimal code changes and you won’t need to re-instrument your events.

Once you have completed the set up, your Fabric events (from that point on) will automatically flow to Firebase so you can build audiences, view historical trends, run custom analysis, and trigger personalized marketing campaigns. You’ll also continue to have access to this data in Fabric.

We’re pumped to unveil this integration, as it represents a big step towards our goal of bringing the best of Fabric and Firebase together so you have one place to build, understand, and grow your app. We can’t wait to hear what you think!