Today we are extremely excited to introduce the Emulator UI to the Firebase community. The Emulator UI is a local web app that allows you to manage local emulators that make up the Firebase Local Emulator Suite.
Last year we released the Emulator Suite to simplify Firebase debugging and development. Until now, the Emulator Suite has only been exposed through the Firebase CLI. Today, the Emulator UI makes it even easier to develop locally with Firebase.
The Emulator UI aims to give you the freedom to develop on Firebase without concerns about billing or breaking a shared environment.
Need to create a function that triggers on the creation of a Firestore document? You can write that code, run it locally, and then create a document in the Emulator UI and see the trigger fire. What's better is that you can even see the logs of the local function to help with any debugging or even just to ensure a successful invocation. The goal is to provide you the safety of developing and testing your code without interfering with shared environments, waiting on deploys, or incurring billing costs.
The Emulator Suite doesn't just help with developer productivity, it also aims to help with team productivity as well. Having a local first environment also allows you to onboard new developers to your team without them needing to manage a cloud-connected Firebase project. Just run a few CLI commands and the Emulator Suite is up and running with local instances of Firebase services.
One of the biggest goals of the Emulator UI is to provide you with a local first workflow. Firebase has always been an online connected service. Most development required managing multiple projects, usually one for production and several others for prototyping, staging and development. The Emulator UI allows you to shift away from needing the online connected project and lets you start your development workflow with local instances.
The Emulator UI is not an exact copy of the online Firebase console. It's tailored for the functionality you need while developing. Here's just a small list of capabilities of the Emulator UI:
...and there's still more to come! We have plenty of features to simplify development planned for the future.
The emulators were designed to run locally. This means it has a looser set of restrictions on managing your data. We want to provide you the freedom to quickly delete and restore data without having to click through a million prompts. But we also don't want you to confuse a local environment with a production one. We took steps to clarify that you are operating in a local environment.
The Emulator UI introduces a new color into the Firebase palette. You'll notice as you navigate around, purple is the new primary color for all buttons, hover and selected states, and other primary actions in UI components. Even the favicon is purple! The online Firebase console uses a blue as the main active state color. With just a quick glance you'll be able to see the difference.
We also moved the navbar to the top for quick navigation. The Overview page displays the local ports of each instance as a reminder as well. We also provide a link to get your production/managed Firebase project, to help establish you are in a local environment versus a production one.
pssst… If you spend enough time in the Emulator UI, you also might find some new features in the Realtime Database data viewer.
Make sure you update the Firebase CLI to version 8.4.0 and run the following command:
firebase init
Select the products you need to initialize. Which means if this is a first time setup, you'll need to set up each Firebase product you need, such as Cloud Functions, Firestore and Realtime Database rules, as well as Hosting sites. Once everything you need is initialized, run the following command:
firebase emulators:start
This will start the Emulator UI on localhost:4000 by default. Open your browser to that URL and you'll see the Emulator UI up and running.
localhost:4000
We are so excited to see the community use the Emulator UI. Our hope is that it boosts your productivity and happiness when working with Firebase. But this is just the first step. We want to know what you are looking for in the Emulator Suite. Send us a tweet! We'd love to hear from you.
We know that Kotlin is the future of Android and that Kotlin developers want clean, idiomatic APIs when they use Firebase in their apps. For the past year, we've been releasing Firebase Kotlin extension (KTX) libraries alongside our Android Java SDKs to give Kotlin developers the best of both worlds.
Today, we're happy to announce that these KTX libraries are out of Beta and recommended for all Firebase developers using Kotlin in their Android apps!
So what does this mean for you?
To get started with our KTX libraries, look for the -ktx suffix in the "Kotlin+KTX" section of our available Android libraries. As an example, let's see what it looks like to set up Remote Config with and without the KTX library.
-ktx
app/build.gradle (before)
implementation 'com.google.firebase:firebase-config:19.1.2'
MainActivity.kt (before)
val remoteConfig = FirebaseRemoteConfig.getInstance() val configSettings = FirebaseRemoteConfigSettings.Builder() .setMinimumFetchIntervalInSeconds(3600) .setFetchTimeoutInSeconds(60) .build() remoteConfig.setConfigSettingsAsync(configSettings)
app/build.gradle (after)
// The -ktx library has a dependency on the firebase-config library implementation 'com.google.firebase:firebase-config-ktx:19.1.2'
MainActivity.kt (after)
// New global "Firebase" class val remoteConfig = Firebase.remoteConfig // New settings builder syntax val configSettings = remoteConfigSettings { minimumFetchIntervalInSeconds = 3600 fetchTimeoutInSeconds = 60 } remoteConfig.setConfigSettingsAsync(configSettings)
And the KTX libraries that we have available today are just the beginning, as we're working hard to add coverage for all Firebase products and add new Kotlin-focused features in the near future!
We wouldn't have been able to release these KTX libraries without the help of all the Kotlin enthusiasts in the Firebase community. We'd like to give a special shout out to Rosário Pereira Fernandes who contributed so much excellent code and documentation to the KTX effort.
If you have feedback or want to contribute, you can find us on GitHub.
Hello, game developers!
Well, this has certainly been a challenging couple of months. We had been looking forward to meeting you in person last week at the Game Developers Conference, sharing some updates, and hearing directly from all of you. But, obviously, plans change, and we're committed to doing whatever it takes to keep everybody safe. Even if it means recording session videos from our kid's bedroom and hoping the cat doesn't wander into the scene.
Still, our teams have been working hard to ensure you have all the tools and resources you need to build great games. This year at our digital Google for Games Developer Summit (which you can find here if you missed it), we announced some new features that will help you spend less time on infrastructure work, and more time on making your game fun and unique. Let's take a look at some of these now, shall we?
Cloud Firestore is our next generation, scalable NoSQL database in the cloud. It offers features that database aficionados love, like multi-region reliability (for five 9s of uptime), atomic transactions, robust offline support, and realtime listeners that let you build some really great gameplay experiences. And we're happy to announce that alpha versions of our SDKs are now available for C++ and Unity developers.
Cloud Firestore can be used in many different situations. You could use it to simply save your users' game state to the cloud. Or save a shared game state to be viewed by several different clients in a multiplayer game. Use it to post daily challenges or user-generated content that can be easily queried and viewed by millions of clients. Or build a sophisticated caching layer on top of your existing game server, so you can share your latest gameplay data from your role-playing game or collectible card game with millions of clients, without having to worry about them hitting your server directly.
Cloud Firestore for C++/Unity is open for anybody to download and use as an open alpha release. This alpha tag means it still has some rough edges here and there. Specifically, the Unity version of the SDK is missing some of the more advanced querying features. And there's a good chance the API will change in the coming months, which means you'll need to change your method names in the future. But we wanted to give you a chance to try it out, see what cool stuff you can build, and let us know how we can make it better.
And none of this is to say that the Realtime Database is going away -- it's still a great option for many situations. In fact, the Google Doodle team just used it to power the Loteria Google Doodle that ran on the Google homepage in December. But if you're a game developer who's been pining away for all the great new features that Cloud Firestore has available, you can stop all that pining and start building.
The Firebase Unity SDKs are now compatible with the Unity Package Manager. This means that in supported versions of Unity, Firebase will be easier to keep up to date and the Firebase plugin will no longer have to be mixed in with the rest of your game’s assets. The process of doing this is automated with an open source tool that used to be known as the Play Services Resolver, but is now known as the External Dependency Manager for Unity, or what we've been calling "EDM4U" around the office.
Note, of course, that using these tools are completely optional. We know that many of you prefer having manual control over all of your libraries, and if you want to keep managing them yourselves, you're more than welcome.
Our friends over at Google Analytics have built a number of new reports that will be of interest to game developers, business analysts, or anybody who wants to grow a successful gaming business.
They've added new dashboards centered around user acquisition, retention, user engagement, and monetization, along with some new reports and visualizations that you've been asking for, like First-time Buyers, Revenue Heartbeat, User Engagement (in game days), and trending DAU / MAU (a good measure of "stickiness").
These new reports are available for all Firebase developers if you've linked your Firebase project to a GA account. You'll just need to head on over to the Google Analytics console to see these reports in detail. For more information, be sure to read the Games reporting article in the Analytics help center.
And what better way to celebrate some new launches than with an updated product page on the Firebase website? Head on over to the new Firebase for Games product page to get a better idea of everything Firebase has to offer to the game developer community.
While we are disappointed that we couldn't spend last week seeing you all in person, we hope that what we've been able to share as part of the online summit has made you a little more interested in adding Firebase into your next new game. We have some documentation and videos to help get you started, and can't wait to see what you build next!
Stay safe, everyone!
This article was cross-posted from the Google Developer Blog. Firebase will be participating in the Google for Games Developer Summit on March 23rd at 9:00AM PT to share how we're making Firebase even more powerful for game developers!
Last month, Game Developers Conference (GDC) organizers made the difficult decision to postpone the conference. We understand this decision, as we have to prioritize the health and safety of our community. GDC is one of our most anticipated times of the year to connect with the gaming industry. Though we won’t be bringing the news in-person this year, we’re hosting the Google for Games Developer Summit, a free, digital-only experience where developers can watch the announcements and session content that was planned for GDC.
Google for Games Developer Summit
The Developer Summit kicks off on March 23rd at 9:00AM PT with our broadcasted keynote. Immediately following, we’ll be releasing a full lineup of developer sessions with over 10 hours of content to help take your games to the next level.
Here are some types of sessions to expect:
Sign up to stay informed at g.co/gamedevsummit.
Support for the game developer community
We recognize every developer is impacted differently by this situation. We’re coordinating with the GDC Relief Fund to sponsor and assist developers who’ve invested in this moment to further grow their games.
We also understand many developers were looking forward to sharing their content with peers. To help with this, developers can use YouTube to stream events from small to large using tools like Live Streaming and Premieres.
We can’t wait to share what we have in store for gaming. Discover the solutions our teams have been building to support the success of this community for years to come.
Stability is critical to your app’s success, so we’ve continued to enhance Firebase with tools to help you maintain high quality apps. This includes bringing the best of Fabric’s crash reporting tools to Firebase. Many of you have made the move from Fabric to Firebase yet still have questions like “Why do I still have ‘Fabric’ everywhere in my code?” or “Why does it feel like I am in Firebase, yet still in Fabric?”
We can now lay your questions to rest. We're excited to announce Firebase Crashlytics SDK is in Beta!
With the Firebase Crashlytics SDK, you can remove all Fabric dependencies, such as references to Fabric’s APIs in your code, giving you a much cleaner codebase.
The Firebase Crashlytics SDK is also designed to be intuitive and consistent with all other Firebase SDKs. For example, the Crashlytics SDK has consistent package names, API design, and initialization as other Firebase SDKs.
The Crashlytics SDK also supports Mac Catalyst apps, in addition to iOS, macOS, and tvOS apps. This new feature makes it easier for you to continue building apps for Apple devices.
We’ve also open-sourced the Crashlytics SDK to further increase the extensibility and transparency of our platform.
Combining analytics data and crashes helps you unlock additional insights into your app’s stability. The Firebase Crashlytics SDK works seamlessly with the Google Analytics SDK to provide features such as crash-free statistics, the Latest Release report, and Breadcrumbs. With Breadcrumbs you can see the steps a user took that led to a crash. This insight helps you reproduce and fix issues quickly. Google Analytics replaces Fabric's legacy analytics engine, Answers, so we encourage you to add Google Analytics to your apps.
Try it out!
Ready to begin developing with Firebase Crashlytics SDK? If you are upgrading from the legacy Fabric Crashlytics SDK, read our upgrade guide. Developers new to Crashlytics should begin with our getting started docs. Interested in the Crashlytics source code? View our Android and iOS repositories on GitHub.
We'd love to hear your feedback. As always, you can reach out to us through our official support page. Happy developing!
