Firebase and Fabric join hands
Developing a successful app is not easy as we need to implement our ideas in Android, iOS, Website to cover a broad range of users. That’s not all, we need to implement other things, like backend database, push notification service, analytics, authentication, crash analytics, adsense, etc. Basically, we need a number of different tools to build an app. Firebase provide us all these tools in one package.
Firebase is a mobile and web application development platform and it’s made up of complementary features that developers can mix-and-match to fit their needs. Over time, it has expanded its product line to become a full suite for app development. A significant number of new features were announced in May 2016 at Google I/O.
In January this year Firebase team join forces with Fabric. Previously been in Twitter, Fabric was this mobile platform that provides great tools for app teams to build understanding and grow their apps. They are working to bring the best of these platforms together. So basically here I am discussing the important things that came after Firebase and Fabric join hands.
One of the best things Firebase and Fabric team did together is to bring Crashlytics into Firebase as a combined flagship cross reporting solution. Crashlytics is a tool that provides real-time insights into the stability of an app with information like app crashes and errors happening out in the field and it also provides information like stack traces and device info to help us diagnose issues. Now the best thing about it is that in addition to showing us these errors it also shows us how these errors impact business metrics like user retention so that you can prioritize and fix these errors accordingly. If you’re an existing user of Crashlytics or Firebase craft reporting, you’ll be happy to know that the Firebase team is bringing these products together and paving a smooth transition path forward over the next coming months.
Another exciting announcement is the introduction of Firebase phone authentication provided by Digits team. Digits and Firebase have teamed up to create the feature set. With Firebase authentication, we can use third-party authentication providers as well as our own email authentication system. So now when we use sign-in with phone number where user enters his phone number, Firebase will check if the user is new or not and will generate a one-time code. The code will be sent via SMS and once the user inputs it, Firebase team will authenticate it and also handle all the duplication logic that’s necessary for multiple ascending.
There are some additional benefits that Firebase authentication offers.
- First, is the stability it offers as it’s built on the same telephony infrastructure that is used by Google’s own login system and in many of its own products.
- Second, they are providing a headless API for us to fully customize the UI of that login experience.
So this isn’t just a template where we can configure a couple parameters, rather we can implement the entire UI layer on our own using this headless API and to make it easy for us to get started.
Firebase has an open-source UI library that implements some of the best practices of the sign-in experience. To get started, Firebase is offering this free for up to 10,000 verifications per month. If you want to continue to scale, it’ll cost you $ 0.01 per verification for users in the US, Canada and India and $ 0.06 for users worldwide.
By: Ajay Pandey, Mind IT Systems