An important part of turning your app into a business is to optimize your user experience to drive the bottom line results you want. A popular way to do this is through manual experimentation, which involves setting up A/B tests for different components of your app and finding the top performing variant. Now, you can save time and effort - and still maximize the objectives you want - with Remote Config’s latest personalization feature. Personalization harnesses the power of machine learning to automatically find the optimal experience for each user to produce the best outcomes, taking the load off you.
At Firebase Summit 2021, we announced that Remote Config personalization is officially available in beta! Let’s take a closer look at this new feature, how it differs from A/B testing, and how you can use it today to grow your business.
Remote Config lets you dynamically control and change the behavior and appearance of your app without releasing a new version or setting up any complex infrastructure. You can use Remote Config to implement feature flags, perform A/B tests, customize your app for different user segments, and now, with personalization, optimize your user experience with minimal work. All you need to do is specify the objective you want to maximize, and personalization will continuously find and apply the right app configuration for each user, taking their behavior and preferences into account and tracking impact on secondary metrics along the way. For example, you can personalize the difficulty of your game according to player skill levels to maximize engagement and session duration.
A/B testing and personalization are both good frameworks for app optimization. While they share some similarities, there are a few big differences that are worth pointing out. First, A/B testing requires you to be hands-on throughout the whole process - from setting up the experiment, determining the variables, monitoring and analyzing results, to rolling out the winning variant. With personalization, you determine the experiences you want to try and state the objective you want to maximize. Then, the personalization algorithm uses machine learning to do the rest. It automatically tries different alternatives with different users, learns which alternatives work best, and chooses the alternative that is predicted to maximize your objective.
Second, A/B testing finds a single, global optimum, while personalization gets more granular to find the optimum treatment for each user so you’re not leaving value on the table.
And a third important difference is the timing required for each feature. A/B testing usually takes at least a few weeks to run an experiment and return a result, whereas personalization goes to work immediately, optimizing selections from the moment it is enabled.
Halfbrick, the game studio behind titles like Jetpack Joyride, Dan the Man, and the instant-classic Fruit Ninja, used personalization to optimize ad frequency, which led to a 16% increase in revenue without affecting engagement or retention. They also used personalization to determine the best time (i.e. when users are most enjoying the game) to ask users to rate their app, and were able to boost positive app store ratings by 15%.
In their own words:
"The granularity achieved with Remote Config's personalization feature is impossible for a human to instrument. Personalization has given us new insight into how we can optimize our ad strategy and even helped us challenge our own assumptions that players don't like too many ads."
— Miguel Pastor, Product Manager, Halfbrick
Ahoy Games, another early customer, tried personalization in a number of their games and successfully grew in-app purchases by 12-13% with little to no effort from their team.
Their CEO, Deniz Piri, had this to say:
“We are very impressed with how magical the personalization feature has been. It's so much more than an A/B test, as it continuously optimizes and serves the right variant to the right groups of people to maximize conversion goals. Without Firebase, we would have a harder time succeeding in an arena full of bigger corporations with our humble 13-person team.”
Let’s walk through an example - say you wanted to personalize the moment you show an ad to players in your game based on how many levels they’ve completed, with the objective of maximizing the number of ad clicks generated in a gaming session.
We’ll suppose you have three alternatives that personalization can choose from:
Let’s look at how you can set this up in your application using Remote Config.
Alternatively, you can also check out this video walkthrough of the personalization feature which includes an overview and an example on how to personalize the timing for showing an app rating prompt to maximize the likelihood of users submitting a review. You can also check out the personalization documentation for complete instructions on getting started with personalization.
The first step will be to go into the Firebase console and into the Remote Config section to create an RC parameter that can be used to provide one of these alternatives in your application. This can be done by navigating to the Firebase console > Remote Config and clicking on “Create configuration” if it’s your first time using Remote Config, or “Add parameter” if you already have some created. This will open up the parameter editor as shown below.
Next, click on Add new > Personalization which will open the personalization editor where you can specify alternative values for the parameter, select the primary objective, as well as set additional metrics and targeting conditions for the personalization. In this example, I’m using ad clicks as the primary optimization goal, and tracking user engagement as a secondary metric to monitor as personalization delivers personalized values to users.
How to create a personalized parameter, including personalization goals and additional metric tracking within a few clicks in the Remote Config parameter editor.
Now you’ll just need to click on “Save” and “Publish changes” to make the new parameter available to any running application instances. The final step is to implement and use your new Remote Config parameter in your application code. You can follow the getting started guide to complete these final steps based on which platform your app is targeting.
From here, personalization will go to work immediately, selecting the best predicted alternative for each user, and collecting metrics along the way to help you determine the effectiveness of personalization in optimizing towards your primary goal. Over time, you’ll see a results summary screen similar to the one in the screenshot below:
The box in gray represents the baseline holdout group, while the box in blue represents the group of users who’ve received personalized values. The total lift shows how much additional value personalization has generated relative to the holdout group that didn’t receive personalized values. Since the baseline group will be much smaller than the personalization group, the numbers in the baseline holdout group are scaled up so that the numbers are comparable, and the total lift can be calculated. You can also breakdown baseline performance details to see how each alternative value performed individually.
As time goes by, you can revisit the results summary page to ensure that the personalization is continuing to deliver more value than the baseline group, maximizing your goal automatically as personalization and Remote Config do their work.
Now that personalization is available in public beta you can start scaling your app today without scaling your effort. Check it out in the Firebase console today, or take a look at our documentation to learn more.
Recently we shared the story of how CrazyLabs, a casual and hypercasual publisher, used Firebase Remote Config to optimize their portfolio of apps at scale. While CrazyLabs had success automating their testing with the Remote Config API, Remote Config can also be a great tool for achieving fast results that have a direct impact on revenue.
Vinwap is an indie developer who helps users personalize their Android devices with “live” wallpaper apps, including Glitter Live Wallpaper Glitzy and 4D Parallax Wallpaper. They use AdMob to monetize their apps, and wanted to see if increasing their use of banner ads would help to increase revenue without alienating their existing users.
Check out our latest case study to see how Vinwap was able to increase revenue by 30% in only six days, and why Wojciech Stefanski, the founder of Vinwap, called Firebase “the go to analysis tool when introducing any new changes.”
If you’ve used Firebase Remote Config, then you know how it can help you control and optimize your app on the fly. And recent improvements help you better visualize your configuration so you can more easily update your app to drive the outcomes you want, like increasing subscription sign-ups. But what if you have a portfolio of many apps that you want to optimize at the same time?
That was the goal of CrazyLabs, a hypercasual and casual publisher whose games, including Super Stylist - Makeover & Style Fashion Guru, Tie Dye, and Phone Case have been downloaded more than 4 billion times. Their business model relies on identifying potentially high-profit games early on among many applicants and helping them scale. CrazyLabs needed a solution that could help them test up to 30 configurations per title across up to 15 titles at a time in order to increase revenue without decreasing user engagement.
Learn how CrazyLabs used Remote Config and AdMob to optimize monetization at scale for all of their titles in our new case study.
Even if your mobile app has been downloaded by millions of users worldwide, making it profitable in the long run is a tricky science. Most apps rely on a mix of ads and in-app purchases (IAP) to make money. The challenge is finding the right balance to maximize both revenue streams while ensuring an engaging experience for every user.
But determining your overall ad monetization strategy without negatively impacting in-app purchases isn’t a one-time effort. Between competition from other apps, changing user behavior, and evolving ad formats, you need to continually assess and experiment with your strategy to find an optimal mix. Doing so can keep users from dropping off from your app and even drive a 25% bump in total ads revenue, as mobile games publisher Pomelo Games discovered.
To tackle this challenge, you need a simple way to test and validate changes to your ads strategy in one place. And ideally, you'll want to gauge the impact of any changes on a small subset of users before rolling them out to your entire user base.
Linking AdMob, Firebase, and Google Analytics provides a streamlined solution to experiment with ads, and make smarter decisions based on app and ad performance insights. Here’s what each tool brings to the table:
Firebase Remote Config allows you to change the appearance and behavior of your app dynamically for any target audience — with no need to release an app update. For instance, you could design a new branding style for users in a certain country or region or change your app's color theme to match a seasonal promotion. You can also provide different app ad experiences, customized to different users in your app.
From there, you can use Firebase A/B Testing with Remote Config to run product and marketing experiments with variants of your app and analyze the results. This helps you make informed decisions about what’s working and whether your changes should be rolled out to more users.
Let’s say you launched a hit space shooter game and want to figure out what type of gameplay keeps users engaged — an easier version with fewer aliens to fight, or a more challenging version with fewer power-ups and a lot more monsters.
Using Remote Config, you build in the framework that enables you to add more challenging elements to your game without having to re-code and publish an entirely new version. Then, you can set up an A/B test that deploys these challenging elements to a small group of users, like your expert-level gaming audience. As part of setting up the A/B test, you choose primary and secondary metrics to optimize for, such as retention rate or total estimated revenue, and then you watch how the more challenging variant performs compared to the easier version.
And thanks to Firebase’s integration with Google Analytics, the actions that users are taking inside the app as a result of your experiments are factored into determining how well a variant performs.
Applied to your ads strategy, this testing framework using Firebase allows you to optimize for goals, like total ads revenue, while also tracking the impact on secondary metrics, like overall app monetization and user retention.
For instance, you might want to figure out if you can earn more ads revenue by adjusting the frequency capping without a drop in user retention. Using AdMob, you can create two ad units that vary in how often they’re shown to the user — say, one ad every 20 minutes versus one ad every five minutes. You can then use Remote Config and A/B testing to evaluate how these two different ad frequencies impact your ad revenue. You can also add secondary metrics to watch during the A/B test, like user retention and IAP revenue.
Or perhaps you’ve noticed a steady drop in ad clicks as people spend more time in your game and suspect it’s related to ad formats. For this case, you can experiment with the various ad formats in AdMob and A/B test these variants on a small number of users who spend more time in your game (an audience determined by Google Analytics). Then, when your A/B test determines which ad format increases ad clicks, you can roll out the new format more widely.
Whether you want to experiment with frequency capping to increase revenue or serve ads to a specific audience, linking AdMob with Firebase and Google Analytics leads to smarter, data-driven decisions. With insights about which users are most likely to spend money in your app, you can even fine-tune who sees an ad versus who’s encouraged to make a purchase instead.
Mobile game publishers around the world have successfully used these tools to optimize their ads and in-app purchases strategies without hindering the player experience. After hearing plenty of positive user feedback — including about the ads themselves — Four Thirty Three Inc. and Pomelo Games (mentioned earlier) were inspired to transform their entire business model, with Firebase tools at the core.
You can watch this session from Firebase Summit and learn more about features you can unlock by linking Firebase, Google Analytics, and AdMob.
Posted by the Firebase team
The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 brought changes and challenges for many businesses. During this time, we saw developers use resilience and ingenuity to adapt their apps and business models to these new circumstances. For GameNexa Studios, an app developer and consultancy based in India, one of the biggest challenges they faced this year was to figure out how to evolve their monetization strategy in the face of declining ad revenue. The GameNexa team needed a data-driven approach to diversify their revenue stream across their portfolio so they turned to Firebase.
With 40 apps and games under their belt serving 5 million monthly users, GameNexa Studios had a well-established monetization strategy, but like many of their peers, it was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Previously, the company earned most of its income from ads in their free-to-download titles. However, when many of their advertisers slashed their budgets, GameNexa’s ad revenue dropped too.
To offset their losses, GameNexa needed to pivot from a one-size-fits-all strategy to a diversified revenue model. But diversifying revenue doesn’t mean bombarding users with more offers and in-app promotions - that could drive people away. The most effective monetization strategies are tailored to user preferences and behavior. So, GameNexa first used Google Analytics and Firebase Predictions to better understand their users and then grouped them into segments based on common characteristics like language, and predicted future behavior, like their propensity to make an in-app purchase.
After gaining insight into their users, GameNexa used Firebase Remote Config and Firebase A/B Testing to test new ad placement, formats, and different in-app promotions on each segment to find which offer resonated with each group. They also worked on improving their user experience with Firebase Crashlytics and Firebase Performance Monitoring.
As a result of these efforts, GameNexa saw a 2.5x increase in revenue from in-app purchases and they were able to bring their ad revenue back up to pre-COVID levels by doubling ad impressions. In addition, by creating customized in-app purchase packs for different audiences, GameNexa increased conversions by 6x. Inspired by their own success, GameNexa now plans on sharing what they’ve learned about the power of data-driven monetization and personalization with other developers through their app consultancy. Read their full story and get more details on how they used Firebase to grow and diversify their revenue in our new case study.
One of the biggest challenges game developers face is figuring out how to improve monetization without compromising their game experience. Many game developers embed ads into their titles, which enables them to offer their games for free and remove the cost barrier of adoption for players - while still generating revenue. In-app advertising can be lucrative, when done effectively and in moderation.
But how do you know what types of ads are best-suited for your game? How do you ensure ads won’t drive away players? These are the exact questions Pomelo Games had. For answers, they turned to Firebase.
Pomelo Games is one of the top game studios in Uruguay. They pride themselves on developing unique and polished games that capture players’ imaginations. Their recent release, Once Upon a Tower, “is an easy-to-pick-up, hard-to-put-down, free-to-play game,” says co-founder Jonás Mora. A Play Store Editors’ Choice, the game is beloved for its high-fidelity graphics, as well as the “fairness of its free-to-play mechanics,” says Jonás.
So when the team needed to improve the game’s monetization, they were unsure how to proceed. They were looking for a way to increase revenue without sacrificing the affordability and game quality their players loved.
Pomelo Games used Firebase Remote Config and Firebase A/B Testing to test a new ad format: interstitials. They also used Google Analytics to monitor revenue and Firebase Crashlytics to keep an eye on stability.
Although initially opposed to the idea, Jonás and his team discovered that showing interstitial ads to their entire player base led to an average 25% increase in AdMob revenue, and surprisingly, a 35% increase in in-app purchases as well. In both cases, there was almost no negative impact on retention or game stability. Firebase gave Pomelo Games the confidence to try new approaches to grow revenue without driving players away. Read Pomelo Games’ full story and get details on their success with Firebase in our new case study. And learn more about how Firebase can help you build and grow your game, and see what other game studios are using Firebase.
Here at Firebase, we know that the first step in making improvements in your app is knowing how your users are interacting with it: what parts they love, where they're having trouble, and what features are sadly underutilized. This is why we built Google Analytics for Firebase from the ground up to be a complete mobile analytics solution, with free and unlimited app analytics designed specifically for the way mobile apps are built.
Now, if you were paying close attention to the last paragraph, you may have noticed that the product formerly known as Firebase Analytics is now called "Google Analytics for Firebase." Don't worry; it's the same analytics product you know and love -- and we'll talk more about the name change in a bit.
Over the last year, we've made a number of improvements to Google Analytics for Firebase, including adding StreamView, which gives you an impression of how users are interacting with your app at this very moment, and DebugView, which allows you to see in precise detail what analytics events (and errors!) might be happening on a test device.
This year at Google I/O, we were thrilled to announce a number of new improvements and enhancements that make using analytics even better. In case you missed those presentations (which you can also watch on YouTube), let's give you a quick summary of what's new with Google Analytics for Firebase.
With Google Analytics for Firebase, you're allowed to submit up to 25 custom parameters alongside any events that you record in your app. For instance, if you were submitting a end_of_round event in a game, you could submit a user_score or premium_coins_earned parameter along with that event. By analyzing these different parameter values, you could then ensure that your game had the high score distribution or general payout rate that you were expecting.
end_of_round
user_score
premium_coins_earned
But up until now, it's been impossible to see the results of most of these custom event parameters without first exporting your data to BigQuery and doing the analysis there. Being able to view summaries of these event parameters directly in the Firebase console has been our most common feature request since analytics first launched last year. So we're very pleased to announce that we've taken our first big steps in making these reports available to you.
To get started with custom event parameters in Firebase, you'll need to let Google Analytics for Firebase know what parameters you're interested in. You can do this by going to the specific event in the Firebase console and clicking the "Add event parameters" button in the interface. From there, you can specify a parameter, note whether it's a number or a string, and add units of measurement, if applicable.
Once you've done that, you'll start seeing these parameter summaries directly in the console. We'll show you sums and averages for numeric values, and a list of your most popular values for strings.
Like other analytics reports available in Google Analytics for Firebase, you can filter these reports by user properties or audiences to get a better sense of how different users are interacting with your app in different ways.
Currently, you can specify up to 50 different event parameters for which you'd like to generate summary reports.
Of course, if you want to analyze a greater number of custom event parameters, or want to do more sophisticated analysis than what's available from the Firebase console, you can export your Google Analytics data directly into BigQuery, Google's data warehouse in the cloud. Analyzing your data in BigQuery is a very powerful way of running all sorts of ad hoc queries or custom analysis on your data, and we want to encourage all our developers to try it out.
To assist you on your journey, we've now added a free tier of storage in BigQuery -- 10 GB of data to be exact -- for every project using Google Analytics for Firebase. Combine this free storage tier with the 1 TB of free monthly query usage that you get from BigQuery, and you can do an awful lot of BigQuery analysis for a relatively little amount of money. And with the new analytics report templates in Data Studio, making stylish reports on custom parameters (or anything else you can measure in BigQuery) is a cinch.
We've made some major enhancements in the way Firebase and AdMob communicate with each other. Much like milk and cookies1, mixing Firebase and AdMob together results in an exciting new flavor combination that complements the strengths of both products!
By linking your AdMob account to Firebase, your app will automatically record analytics events associated with AdMob (along with mediated ad units) just like any other analytics event. This gives Google Analytics for Firebase the ability to create reports on ad impressions, clicks, and exposure time, broken down by important characteristics such as screen, ad format or ad unit. This makes it easier than ever before to see which ads are most effective in your app, where you're earning the most ad dollars, or which ads your users spend the most time viewing.
Linking your AdMob and Firebase accounts together also gives you a more complete picture of where you're making money in your app. Both the APRU reports on the dashboard and the Lifetime Value metrics in the Attribution reports will now include revenue generated from AdMob advertising, as well as in-app purchases.
This can help you gain a much more complete understanding of how your app is doing from a revenue standpoint, and help you more accurately gauge which growth campaigns are bringing you users who are earning you the most revenue.
If, like me, you enjoy spending your free time reading the latest Firebase Release Notes, you might have noticed that a few months ago, Firebase started adding screen tracking support to the events that it was recording. This month, we're taking the first steps towards adding screen tracking reports in Google Analytics for Firebase, by showing you the top three screens your users are spending time on. You can find this information in the User Engagement section of the Firebase Dashboard.
Screen tracking reporting works behind the scenes by automatically logging a screen_view event whenever a screen transition occurs. These events are then combined on the server to paint a more complete picture of the user's journey throughout your app. And just like any other event, you can view them in StreamView or DebugView, or analyze them through BigQuery. If you would like to customize these events -- for instance, you're a game developer who has multiple "screens" all within the same ViewController -- you can do so with by setting these events manually on the client.
screen_view
You can already use Google Analytics for Firebase for attribution tracking, which helps you learn not just which ad networks are sending you users, but which ones are sending you valuable users that you care about the most. And we're pleased to announce a new integration with DoubleClick Digital Marketing that will include attribution tracking for DoubleClick Campaign Manager and Bid Manager. Add this to the 50+ third-party advertising networks (and growing!) that we've integrated into our system, and Firebase can help you make better decisions around where to spend your advertising dollars with true cross-network attribution data.
If you're using the old Google Analytics Services SDK in your existing apps, don't worry; it's not going anywhere. But we encourage you to start adding the Firebase SDK in future releases. Using the Firebase SDK will give you access to the latest reports in Google Analytics for Firebase and to new functionality as it becomes available. If you're a long-time Google Analytics fan, you can use Google Tag Manager to automatically send your events data to those reports as well. If you need more help on this topic, we wrote a blog post a few months back that covers a few strategies on how to get both these analytics libraries working together in your app. Give it a read sometime!
We're thrilled to be bringing you these improvements to Google Analytics for Firebase -- they should be already available in the Give it a read sometime today (check out the demo project for an example!). If you haven't yet added analytics to your product, you can find all the documentation you need here to get started. Give it a try, and let us know what you think!
1. Or chili and mango, which Steve Ganem assures me is delicious, but sounds weird to me.↩
Since expanding Firebase to become Google's mobile application development platform at Google I/O last year, our amazing community of developers has created over 1 million Firebase projects.
We're thrilled so many of you use and trust us. While Firebase is a full suite of products for building and growing apps, we know that some apps need more than we offer out-of-the-box. That's why we're bringing Firebase much closer to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to serve even the most demanding applications, whether you're a new startup or a large enterprise.
Firebase already shares the same account and billing system as GCP, so you can attach Firebase services to your GCP project and vice-versa. This makes for powerful combinations, such as exporting raw event data from Firebase Analytics into BigQuery for ad-hoc analysis. Starting today, we're beginning to share products too.
First, Firebase developers have been asking for ways to extend their app's functionality without spinning up a server, and Cloud Functions for Firebase lets you do just that. Cloud Functions is our new event-driven serverless compute offering that enters public beta today. The infrastructure is shared between Cloud and Firebase, allowing you to invoke a function or access resources from throughout the Cloud/Firebase ecosystem. For more information, read the announcement on the Firebase blog and Cloud blog.
Next, we're bringing Firebase Storage closer to Cloud Storage. Firebase Storage launched 10 months ago, and lets you easily upload and download files from your device directly to Cloud Storage. Previously we gave you a single bucket for your files. Now we're fully aligning the two products and letting you use any Cloud Storage bucket, from any global region and from any storage class, all straight from the Firebase SDK. To reflect this alignment we're renaming the product Cloud Storage for Firebase. Read more in our blog post.
Stay tuned for more product integrations in the future as Firebase continues to provide direct client-side access to GCP infrastructure through our iOS, Web, and Android SDKs.
We love lawyers almost as much as developers, so we're extending GCP's Terms of Service to cover several Firebase products. This makes Firebase and Cloud simpler to evaluate and use together. Products to be covered include: Authentication, Hosting, Storage, Functions, and Test Lab. Our streamlined Terms of Service will take effect soon.
Firebase brings together the best of Google on mobile -- whether that's Google's flagship advertising solutions like AdMob and AdWords, or Google's analytics expertise in the form of Firebase Analytics.
Google Cloud Platform lets you to benefit from the institutional knowledge Google has developed from almost two decades of running global-scale computing infrastructure.
By bringing together the ease-of-use of Firebase with the full-range of GCP infrastructure offerings, we're better able to serve you up and down the stack. If you're a startup using Firebase to quickly get to market, you can now easily scale into a full public cloud. If you're an existing business running on GCP who wants to ship a mobile app, we've got you covered too.
We can't wait to see what you build with Firebase and Google Cloud Platform!
Successful apps turn into successful revenue generating businesses when the right business model is built into the core app development strategy from the very beginning. Since Firebase is designed to help app developers at every part of their lifecycle, from creating high-quality apps to growing and monetizing their app traffic, let’s take a peek at what monetization concepts you could be thinking about now.
Ready to start exploring AdMob?
Sign up for an AdMob account and link it to your Firebase project.
The transformation of Firebase into a unified mobile platform brought with it new Gradle artifacts and CocoaPods that mobile developers can use to import the Mobile Ads SDK. With these additions, there are now several alternatives for each platform. Thanks to your feedback, we wanted to share a little more information about which ones we recommend and what libraries they include, so here's a quick run-down.
This is the best way to get the Mobile Ads SDK into your project. With the firebase-ads artifact, you get everything you need to load and display ads from AdMob, DFP, or AdX, plus Firebase Analytics built in. You'll also be ready to add the client components for any other Firebase services you want to use, like firebase-crash or firebase-config. Unless you have a specific need to use the SDK without Firebase, this is your jam.
firebase-ads
firebase-crash
firebase-config
If you'd like to see a screencast of how to get up and running with AdMob using firebase-ads, check out this episode of the Firecasts series:
For those not using Firebase, this Gradle artifact contains the Mobile Ads SDK on its own. You'll get the client code for AdMob, DFP, and AdX, but no Firebase services.
This is the full Google Play services client, also without Firebase. This gives you not only the Mobile Ads SDK, but all the other Google Play services SDKs as well: Maps, Drive, Fit, and so on. Since you're probably not using every API that Play services offers, it's better to import them individually. If you need mobile ads and Play games, for example, just include play-services-ads and play-services-games.
play-services-ads
play-services-games
The SDK team developed this new Gradle artifact for a very specific use-case. It contains a slimmed-down version of the Mobile Ads SDK designed to work only on devices that have Google Play services installed. If reducing app size is extremely important for you, this can help lessen the impact of the Mobile Ads SDK, but it won't be able to load and display ads on devices that don't have Play services. Make sure you're intimately familiar with your app's install base before considering this tradeoff, and see the Lite SDK guide for more details.
This is the Firebase CocoaPod for AdMob and the Mobile Ads SDK. While it's labelled as "AdMob," this pod gives you the iOS client code for DFP and AdX as well. You'll get everything you need to load and display ads from all three sources, plus Firebase Analytics built in. This CocoaPod is also easy to combine with any other Firebase pods your app needs, like Firebase/Crash and Firebase/Database. For most developers, this is the one you want.
Firebase/Crash
Firebase/Database
The Firecasts series has an episode that shows how to import AdMob and Firebase into an app using Firebase/AdMob, so check that out for a detailed screencast:
Firebase/AdMob
For developers not yet using Firebase, this pod contains just Mobile Ads SDK. You get everything necessary to show ads from AdMob, DFP, and AdX, but no Firebase services.
This is an older, alternate CocoaPod for the Mobile Ads SDK that should no longer be used. Google-Mobile-Ads-SDK is the better choice if you aren't using Firebase.
Google-Mobile-Ads-SDK
If you've got questions about Firebase and the best ways to get started, the Firebase support page also has a bunch of options that can help. If you've got technical questions about the Mobile Ads SDK itself, you're welcome to stop by the SDK support forum.
Eighteen months ago, Firebase joined Google. Since then, our backend-as-a-service (BaaS) that handles the heavy lifting of building an app has grown from a passionate community of 110,000 developers to over 450,000.
Our current features -- Realtime Database, User Authentication, and Hosting -- make app development easier, but there’s more we can do, so today, we’re announcing a major expansion!
Firebase is expanding to become a unified app platform for Android, iOS and mobile web development. We’re adding new tools to help you develop faster, improve app quality, acquire and engage users, and monetize apps. On top of this, we’re launching a brand new analytics product that ties everything together, all while staying true to the guiding principles we’ve had from the beginning:
Firebase Analytics is our brand new, free and unlimited analytics solution for mobile apps. It benefits from Google’s experience with Google Analytics, and features some new capabilities for apps:
Firebase Analytics is user and event-centric and gives you insight into what your users are doing in your app. You can also see how your paid advertising campaigns are performing with cross-network attribution, which tells you where your users are coming from. You can see all of this from a single dashboard.
Firebase Analytics is also integrated with other Firebase offerings to provide a single source of truth for in-app activity and through a feature called Audiences. Audiences let you define groups of users with common attributes. Once defined, these groups can be accessed from other Firebase features -- to illustrate, we’ll reference Audiences throughout this post.
To help you build better apps, our suite of backend services is expanding.
Google Cloud Messaging, the most popular cloud-to-device push messaging service in the world, is integrating with Firebase and changing its name to Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM). Available for free and for unlimited usage, FCM supports messaging on iOS, Android, and the Web, and is heavily optimized for reliability and battery-efficiency. It’s built for scale and already sends 170 billion messages per day to two billion devices.
One of our most requested features is the ability to store images, videos, and other large files. We’re launching Firebase Storage so developers can easily and securely upload and download such files. Firebase Storage is powered by Google Cloud Storage, giving it massive scalability and allowing stored files to be easily accessed by Google Cloud projects. The Firebase Storage client SDKs have advanced logic to gracefully handle poor network conditions.
Firebase Remote Config gives you instantly-updatable variables that you can use to tune and customize your app on the fly to deliver the best experience to your users. You can enable or disable features or change the look and feel without having to publish a new version. You can also target configurations to specific Firebase Analytics Audiences so that each of your users has an experience that’s tailored for them.
In addition, we’re continuing to invest heavily in our existing backend products, Firebase Realtime Database, Firebase Hosting, and Firebase Authentication. Authentication has seen the biggest updates, with brand new SDKs, and an upgraded backend infrastructure. This provides added security, reliability, and scale using the same technologies that power Google’s own accounts. We’ve also added new Authentication features including email verification and account linking. For Hosting, custom domain support is now free for all developers, and the Database has a completely rebuilt UI. We’re working hard on other great Realtime Database features, stay tuned for those.
We’re adding two new offerings to Firebase to help you deliver higher quality apps.
When your app crashes, it’s bad for your users and it hurts your business. Firebase Crash Reporting gives you prioritized, actionable reports to help you diagnose and fix problems in your iOS or Android app after it has shipped. We’ve also connected Crash Reporting to Audiences in Firebase Analytics, so you can tell if users on a particular device, in a specific geography, or in any other custom segment are experiencing elevated crash rates.
Cloud Test Lab, announced last year at Google I/O, is now Firebase Test Lab for Android. Test Lab helps you find problems in your app before your users do. It allows for both automatic and customized testing of your app on real devices hosted in Google data centers.
After you’ve launched your app, we can help you grow and re-engage users with five powerful growth features.
Firebase Notifications is a new UI built on top of the Firebase Cloud Messaging APIs that lets you easily deliver notifications to your users without writing a line of code. Using the Notifications console you can re-engage users, run marketing campaigns, and target messages to Audiences in Firebase Analytics.
Firebase Dynamic Links make URLs more powerful in two ways. First, they provide “durability” -- links persist across the app install process so users are taken to the right place when they first open your app. This “warm welcome” increases engagement and retention. Second, they allow for dynamically changing the destination of a link based on run-time conditions, such as the type of browser or device. Use them in web, email, social media, and physical promotions to gain insight into your growth channels.
Firebase Invites turns your customers into advocates. Your users can easily share referral codes or their favorite content via SMS or email to their network, so you can increase your app's reach and retention.
Firebase App Indexing, formerly Google App Indexing, brings new and existing users to your app from the billions of Google searches. If your app is already installed, users can launch it directly from the search results. New users are presented with a link to install your app.
AdWords, Google’s advertising platform for user acquisition and engagement, is now integrated with Firebase. Firebase can track your AdWords app installs and report lifetime value to the Firebase Analytics dashboard. Firebase Audiences can be used in AdWords to re-engage specific groups of users. In-app events can be defined as conversions in AdWords, to automatically optimize your ads, including universal app campaigns.
To help you generate revenue from your app and build a sustainable business, we’ve integrated Firebase with AdMob, an advertising platform used by more than 1 million apps. We’ve made it easier to get started with AdMob when you integrate the Firebase SDK into your app. Using AdMob, you can choose from the latest ad formats, including native ads, which help provide a great user experience.
Along with new feature launches, we’re moving our website and documentation to a new home: firebase.google.com.
We’re also launching a brand new console to manage your app. It is completely redesigned and rebuilt for improved ease of use, and we’ve deeply integrated it with other Google offerings, like Google Cloud and Google Play.
Firebase now uses the same underlying account system as Google Cloud Platform, which means you can use Cloud products with your Firebase app. For example, a feature of Firebase Analytics is the ability to export your raw analytics data to BigQuery for advanced querying. We’ll continue to weave together Cloud and Firebase, giving you the functionality of a full public cloud as you grow.
You can also link your Firebase account to Google Play from our new console. This allows data, like in-app purchases, to flow to Firebase Analytics, and ANRs (application not responding) to flow to Firebase Crash Reporting, giving you one place to check the status of your app.
Finally, we’re announcing the beta launch of a new C++ SDK. You can find the documentation and getting started guides here.
We’re excited to announce that most of these new products, including Analytics, Crash Reporting, Remote Config, and Dynamic Links, are free for unlimited usage.
For our four paid products: Test Lab, Storage, Realtime Database, and Hosting, we’re announcing simpler pricing. We now offer:
Many things are changing, but Firebase’s core principles remain the same. We care deeply about providing a great developer experience through easy-to-use APIs, intuitive interfaces, comprehensive documentation, and tight integrations. We’re committed to cross-platform development for iOS, Android, and the Web, and when you run into trouble, we’ll provide support to help you succeed.
If you were using a Firebase feature before today -- like the Realtime Database, GCM, or App Indexing -- there’s no impact on your app. We’ll continue to support you, though we recommend upgrading to the latest SDK to access our new features.
As far as we’ve come, this is still early days. We’ll continue to refine and add to Firebase. For example, the JavaScript SDK does not yet support all the new features. We’re working quickly to close gaps, and we’d love to hear your feedback so we can improve. You can help by requesting a feature.
All the new features are ready-to-go, and already in use by apps like Shazam, SkyScanner, PicCollage, and more. Get started today by signing up, visiting our new site, or reading the documentation to learn more.
We can’t wait to hear what you think!