Building and testing mobile applications could soon become a much more streamlined experience for developers who rely on Google Inc.’s cloud-based Firebase toolkit.
At an event in Berlin today, the search giant introduced a new iteration of the managed backend that promises to speed up several key parts of the software lifecycle, starting with bug removal. The suite’s Test Lab service now makes it possible to check for application runtime issues on 11 additional Android devices and has been included in the free Spark subscription tier.
According to a blog post from Firebase product manager Francis Ma, developers who use the latter plan can now perform up to 15 test runs per day at no charge. This should be more than enough for small projects that don’t require the paid version of the toolkit.
The updated Test Lab is joined by Crash Reporting, a troubleshooting service that was first unveiled in May and is finally coming out of beta as part of today’s rollout. Google has added a diagnostics capability to the tool on occasion of the launch that can use data from Firebase Analytics to display what happened in the run-up to a malfunction. A company that offers a mobile shopping app, for instance, could use the feature to see what product pages a user viewed before their client crashed.
Google’s Ma wrote that the enhancement thus spares developers the hassle of writing custom code to pull data from Firebase Analytics into their troubleshooting workflows. And rolling out targeted updates now takes less effort, too, thanks to expanded integration between the service and Firebase Remote Config. The addition provides the ability to narrow down the users who receive a change based on specific attributes such as their country, age and gender. It should be particularly useful for running A/B tests to see how a particular audience reacts to different variations of the same feature.
Developers can learn about the new enhancements and Firebase as a whole through a new Udacity course that Google has launched alongside the update. It’s described as a two-day, instructor-led program geared towards both Android and iOS programmers. More details are available in the FireBase portal.
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