[MUSIC PLAYING]
FRANK VAN PUFFELEN: Here at Firebase, we're
always making improvements and fixing problems
in all of our products.
And sometimes those are big deal,
and you'll read and hear about them everywhere.
But sometimes they're much smaller,
and you can easily miss them.
Well, not anymore, because every month
or so, I'm going to dig up my favorite updates,
both big and small, and present them
to you here on an episode of "Firebase Release Notes".
Now, we have a lot to cover again today.
So let's dig in right away.
If you go to our firebase.google.com landing
page, you might notice that it looks
quite different from before.
Because as Firebase has grown, we've
increased our product offering.
And we had outgrown our existing billing structure
that we had used since 2016.
So the new site features three product categories
that align to your app development
lifecycle-- build, release and monitor, and engage.
So it should be easier to find the product you're looking for.
And products can also exist in multiple of these categories.
And then we highlight the relevant product benefits
in each category.
So go to firebase.google.com today to see these changes
and to learn all about all of our products.
If you download the latest version of the Firebase
command-line interface, you'll notice
that it now supports writing Cloud Functions that
target Node version 14 and that it no longer supports
deploying Cloud Functions that target Node 8.
While you can still deploy those with older versions of the CLI,
that will also stop working in a few weeks.
So now, honestly, is the best time
to upgrade to the latest versions.
And if you're new to installing Node,
keep in mind that we have pre-compiled binary versions
with Firebase CLI for Linux, Mac, and of course,
for Windows.
Find the links to these builds and all releases
in the description below.
There is now documentation on how
to run geo queries on top of Firestore.
These are queries that, for example, give you
all documents within 50 kilometers of a point,
like Parisia.
While we'd all love for Firestore
to support such queries natively,
this is the easiest we can make it for now.
We've created an open-source GeoFire command library,
which contains everything you need
that has to do with geohashes.
Those are the magic string values that
make these queries possible.
And the documentation then describes
how to include this library for your platform
and then how to write your first geo query against it.
I've included a link to the documentation
in the description below and to a longer
video where I explain more about geohashes and how they work.
Since version 7.4 of our iOS SDK,
it now includes the source code for Firebase
performance-monitoring clients.
We love being able to share even more code with you,
as it allows everyone to see how the products work.
And it allows anyone to contribute to the product.
A great example of that happened in this SDK release, too.
Because GitHub user joehinkle11 proposed and implemented
a feature that synchronizes the Firebase authentication
keychain credentials of the signed-in user via iCloud.
This means that your users can now
have a shared sign-in state across all of their Apple
devices.
So if they sign into your Firebase app on their phone,
they're also signed into it on their iPad automatically.
Of course, you will need to enable this feature
before it becomes active.
But the initial feedback from developers is very positive.
So thanks to Joe Hinkle for this awesome PR.
Firebase extensions are an easy way
to add new functionality to your app with a click of a button.
They are based on Firebase and Google Cloud products
that you already know and use.
And installing extensions is super
easy via the Firebase console or the command-line interface.
To continue to make new extensions available as quickly
as possible, we are introducing a new set
of experimental extensions that are built by the Firebase team.
These are fully functional extensions
that we think you'll find very useful.
But they haven't yet gone through the same amount
of testing and polish as the official extensions.
And as with all extensions, they are
open-source so you can check the code to see how they work.
You can find a link to the documentation and the five
new extensions below.
That's all we have for today.
My name is Frank [? Puff, ?] and I'll
see you on a future episode of "Firebase Release Notes".