Firebase Summit in Berlin 2016

On 7th of November ClickOn joined 200 developers at Firebase Dev Summit. The event was held at Intercontinental Hotel in Berlin. The Summit is a full day event for app developers who focus on how to use Firebase for your applications. Agenda is packed with valuable sessions from Google and its partners, and is a great chance to meet developers from your local community.

What is Firebase?

It is a cloud-hosted NoSQL database. Data is stored as JSON, synced across connected devices in milliseconds, and available when your app goes offline. Intuitive and easy-to-use API. Remains responsive regardless of network latency or Internet connectivity so your App works offline.

Key presentations from the event

Keynote - Ben Galbraith, Head of product and developer relations at Google's Developer Product Group

Analytics

  • Real-time conversions - up to 10 most important events of your app to be uploaded to Analytics and BigQuery immediately without delay (1h-4h)

Google Data Studio

  • Visualizes raw Analytics data
  • It’s easy to create reports and share (same as sharing Google drive docs)

DebugView

  • Real time reporting for developments
  • It lets you analyze how your event reporting of analytics is set up, it shows the sequence of events in real time

StreamView

  • World map with real time analytics data
  • Filtering data on custom events, user properties logged in analytics etc
  • You can see how people react to new version installs, push notifications immediately on the map

Action-packed Analytics - Steve Ganem

Analytics

  • Crash reports tell Analytics (in debug view) about crashes
  • Analytics tell Crash reports what action events were taken up to this crash and display the sequence (makes so much easier to reproduce, no need for QA to try guess the scenario)

Remote config

  • Set remote configs based on condition. Conditions can be set for user properties that are reported/logged to analytics etc. (User properties can be user types somehow selected in app)

Notifications

  • Send notifications based on Audience, like send a notification for users who scan NFC badges the most and make an offer specific for them.
  • Extra on Notifications: There are now notifications for Chrome (will be soon for Safari, Opera, Firefox if not already is)

Develop Rock Solid Apps  - Justin Broughton and Ali Abdelhadi

Testing and Crash Reporting

  • Analyze data of reported crash
  • Start Espresso Recorder and go through same actions that lead to a crash and generate Espresso test this way
  • Run this generated test in Test lab with configuration that matches the Reported crash
  • Confirm that test has failed in Test lab (as it should)
  • Fix the test
  • Run same configuration in Test lab with a bug fix and make sure test doesn’t fail anymore

Espresso Test Recorder

  • Tool that generates Espresso tests by tracking actions taken on the device! You don’t need to write test, you just need to do the scenario on device and tests will be generated!
  • Assertions can also be tested

Crash Reporting

  • Imports data from Analytics that lead to a crash

Test Lab

  • 5 physical, 10 virtual tests every day for free

Develop Mobile Apps without Infrastructure - Frank van Puffelen, Kat Fang, and Thomas Bouldin

Real-time NoSQL backend

  • Which means when Android/iOS sets some data, back-end then gets notified and can apply needed data manipulation on that data and now manipulated data is available for clients like Android and iOS
  • Google application default credentials is the best way to secure back-end app

Growth Hacking - Laurence Moroney and Francesco Nerieri

App invites

  • Send invitation to the app directly from the app
  • Use built-in invitations UI to select account to send this invitation to All accounts are sorted relevant to the user
  • Use deep linking to send invitation to specific activity/screen of your app with some specific data

More resources and demo projects

  • DebugView early access: bit.ly/debugview-beta
  • Screenshot on security for filtered items: https://goo.gl/photos/CRPpMHK8QH2dGJw6A
  • rxJava and Firebase https://gist.github.com/gsoltis/86210e3259dcc6998801
  • Friendly chat codelab: https://goo.gl/s4yM5A
  • Icon shop codelab: https://github.com/googlecodelabs/icon-shop
  • Firebase demo project: https://goo.gl/RUxNIE
  • Screenshot on security rule for filtered items: https://goo.gl/QXYfte
  • New Udacity course on Firebase https://goo.gl/ox9j0h