[MUSIC PLAYING]
FRANK VAN PUFFELEN: Welcome to Firebase Release Notes
for March, where we'll be looking
at some big and small releases from Firebase
from the past month or so.
We have six topics today, so let's dig in right away.
A few months ago, I showed you the new structure
of the Firebase homepage, which focuses more on the development
phases of your project.
Well, we just also updated our documentation
to follow the exact same structure.
So if you now go to firebase.google.com/docs,
you see the new Build, Release and Monitor,
and Engage sections, as well as a section on Firebase
fundamentals.
Each of the links takes you to a different section
of the documentation, where the left navigation only
shows the products that are relevant to that development
phase.
The top navigation still contains
the complete list of links, so you can get everywhere quickly.
I've been using this new structure for a bit,
and I love how much more focused the left navigation is.
So I hope it's the same for you.
Firebase Remote Config helps you manage and monitor
your app configurations from within the Firebase console.
This means that you can make changes to your app
without having to build and release a new version
every time.
We have just improved the Remote Config parameter list
so that parameter rows can be expanded for a detailed view
or collapsed for a summary view.
We also added what we call logic lines,
to indicate the relationship between a condition
and its values.
And A/B testing experiments and their variant level details
are now displayed directly in the table,
giving you a much more complete and comprehensive view
of your Remote Config template.
And finally, we made search faster,
we improved accessibility, and we improved the experience
on mobile.
All of this provides you with a much better view
of your app configurations.
Got any feedback?
Leave it in the comments below.
In BoM version 26.6 of the Firebase SDKs for Android,
we added custom hosted model downloads
and on-device management capabilities
to Firebase Machine Learning.
You can now also get the model download
ID, which allows you to track the progress when
downloading models.
In addition, we added support for Gradle configuration cache
for Crashlytics and PerfMon, for both the regular and the NDK
builds.
This should significantly improve the performance
of repeated builds, if you use those products
and, of course, if you have the caching enabled.
The SDK also contains many other bug fixes.
So be sure to upgrade with the links that I provided below.
I hope you all caught the Flutter Engage
event a few weeks ago, where Flutter tool was released.
But even if not, if you're using Flutter,
you're probably aware of the migration
to null safety that was introduced
as part of this event.
FlutterFire is a set of high quality plugins designed
to help developers integrate Firebase services
into their Flutter apps.
Now, many of the FlutterFire plugins
have already been upgraded to be soundly null safe,
and work on others is underway.
If you want to get started with Firebase in your Flutter app,
check out firebase.flutter.dev or the documentation
that I link below.
In Firebase, you can use custom dimensions and metrics
to collect and analyze data that Analytics
doesn't track automatically.
This means that you can provide values for custom dimensions,
and for metrics and parameters when you log events
and when you set user properties in your code.
There is now one unified management table
for these dimensions and metrics,
you can find it from the Google Analytics left navigation
by going to Configure and then Custom Definitions.
To register a custom dimension, click the Create Custom
Dimension button, follow the prompts, and click Save.
All custom dimensions are now also available for use
throughout the Analytics console in Reporting,
the Audience and Segment Builder, and in Analysis.
See the link in the description for full details.
Last month, I told you about the many features
in the latest release of Firebase Performance
Monitoring.
Now, in all the excitement about its faster reporting
and the ability to run without Google Play services,
I completely forgot to mention that the Performance Monitoring
SDK for iOS and Android are now also open source.
Like for all our open source bug we
love community contributions, such as book reports, feature
requests, and, even more so, pull requests.
The links to the GitHub repos are in the description below,
so I look forward to seeing you there.
That's all we have for today.
My name is Frank, or Puf, and I'll
see you on a future episode of Firebase Release Notes.