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FRANK VAN PUFFELEN: Welcome to Firebase Release Notes
for February, where we'll be looking
at big and small releases from Firebase for the past month
or so.
We have six topics today, so let's dig in right away.
Thanks to contributions from the community,
many of the Firebase SDKs now work on tvOS, Mac OS, watchOS,
and on Catalyst.
So you can now build apps that use Firebase on many more Apple
platforms.
Now, keep in mind that the SDK is still primarily developed
for iOS, but we're excited to make
these community-supported efforts available to developers
in zip format already.
Find the links to the release and more information
in the description below.
Firebase Performance Monitoring on Android
now no longer requires Google Play services.
This means that you can now use Firebase to measure performance
on a much broader range of Android and AOSP devices.
Migrating away from Google Play services
was a long-running effort because
of pretty deep dependencies in the PerfMon SDK.
Now, removing those dependencies actually
shaved off about 500 kilobytes from the app's binary size,
too.
And finally this release also reduces the time
it takes for performance events to show up
in the Firebase console, from two hours to 30 seconds.
So there's really no good reason to wait with upgrading.
If you have a lot of Cloud Functions in your projects,
with the latest CLI you will see much faster deploy times.
This improvement is caused by a change in the way
the back end build process creates a container
for Cloud Functions.
And this should also decrease the likelihood of seeing
partial deploys, where some of your functions got updated
and others didn't.
So if you have a lot of Cloud Functions in your project,
and you've had to run multiple deployments to get them
all updated, upgrading to the latest version of the CLI
should give you a much smoother experience,
and it should be much faster.
Find the links to the release in the description below.
A few months ago, I told you about our documentation
to help you prepare for Apple's app store data disclosure
requirements.
Now with iOS 14, Apple requires developers
to receive the user's permission through the app tracking
transparency framework to track them
or to access their device's advertising identifier, often
referred to as ITFA.
We just also released documentation
to help you prepare for iOS 14.
Firebase SDKs do not access ITFA directly, but some of them
have integrations with Google Analytics,
and that involve ITFA access.
The documentation lists Firebase products
that are available on iOS, and it
describes how the functionality of each product
is impacted if ITFA is not accessible.
See the link to this new documentation
in the description below.
Cloud Firestore for games is now publicly available in beta
for C++ and Unity developers.
A big improvement over the previous alpha version is that
the new libraries have full feature parity with
the platform-specific Firebase SDKs,
so every feature in the Firestore C++ SDK now works
identically on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and on Linux.
This means that you can develop your game
logic on the desktop computer and be confident
that it runs the same way on every target device.
We've also fully opensourced the C++ SDK,
so we can now easily build, debug,
and port your code to wherever you need it to run.
See all information about this release in the blog
posts that are linked below.
And finally, since version 7.5 of the iOS SDK,
version 19.6 of the Android SDK, and version 8.1
of the JavaScript SDK, there is now a Get operation
to get data from the Realtime Database.
This new operation solves a longstanding race issue
in our native mobile SDKs, where reading a value once could
return still data from the [? disk-based ?] cache.
We also used this opportunity to align with other APIs,
so that Get on Androids now returns a task object.
The TODR is simple.
If you need a value from the database only once,
use the new Get method.
Links to all these SDK releases are in the description below,
and a blog post on this should be published shortly.
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.
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