The Benefits of Using Firebase in Mobile App Development Projects: Cloud Messaging, Remote Configuration

Remember the good old days when you could publish an app and it was perfect in every way? You never had to touch a single line of code because you managed to get everything exactly right the first time?

Well, neither do we.

Being a successful app developer involves making frequent adjustments or alterations to your app. Such adjustments can be new features or bug fixes, but, sometimes, the most impactful adjustments are one-line changes to your code, such as adjusting a line of text or building a powerful unit in a tower defense game.

Developing a mobile app or a website can be an exhaustive process since it requires a lot of time and money. Nevertheless, there are a lot of services which are capable of facilitating the development work in various ways and one of them is through Firebase. It takes a major chunk of the workload of the developers’ shoulders and offers various functions that companies might find exceptionally valuable.

Let’s take a look at what exactly Firebase is and what benefits companies can reap from using it.

What is Firebase?

Firebase is a framework which assists the development of websites and apps for companies across the globe with a real-time database. This means that when one user updates their record(s) in the database, that particular update will be available for all users to see, in both websites or web applications. This provides a basic and unified platform with lots of features so developers do not need to configure their server while using Firebase. The framework takes care of everything automatically.

There are many components which make working with Firebase convenient from the developer’s point of view, which pertain to the core development technology. This will help maintain harmony between the developer and the customer by causing minimal work delay.

Firebase for Cloud Messaging

Since Firebase is a cross-platform messaging solution, Firebase cloud messaging, lets users reliably send messages at literally no cost. Marketing professionals can pre-define customer segments to send targeted messages or create their own, based on demographics and behavior. To those who have subscribed to specific topics, you can send target messages to or get as granular as a single device.

With Firebase, software developers can send push notifications for their apps to end users via an application programming interface (API). Push notifications are popular on mobile devices because they save battery life. With push notifications, the cloud service acts on behalf of the app and only connects to the mobile device when there are new notifications.

Two elements are required in order to send and receive messages using Firebase: a trusted environment or server on which to build, direct and send messages and an Android, iOS or Web client app to receive messages. With Firebase, developers can send two types of messages to users: data messages and notifications messages.  Notification messages are displayed on the user’s device by Firebase on behalf of the app while data messages are directly processed by the app, which is responsible for delivering the message to the user.

Firebase is able to deliver messages to applications via message targeting, in three ways: to single devices, to devices subscribed to topics and to groups of devices. Developers can create messages in the Notification composer, which can send targeted messages to specific segments of users. These messages are fully integrated with Firebase Analytics, which tracks user conversion and engagement.

Firebase for Remote Configuration

Changing the appearance and behavior of your app has never been easier thanks to Firebase Remote Config. You can also track performance in Google Analytics for Firebase and customize by audience segment, release new content, and split test to validate improvements, all without waiting for approval from the application store. It allows you to change the app’s default appearance and behavior by changing server-side parameters. For example, you can change your app’s color scheme to match a seasonal promotion or change the start date of a sale with having to release an app update.

If you would like to implement Remote Config, you should first decide which part of the application is updated with Remote Config, then add parameters/define conditions (service-side), and finally develop the app (client-side). You should not use Remote Config with user authentication to make update content, store confidential data, change the requirements of the applications platform.

You can tailor your app for different audiences thus providing a different app experience to different segments of your user base. You can segment by user property, app version, operating system, language, country, and by any custom audience, you can define in Firebase Analytics.

Want to tweak your onboarding flow or get insight into how a new feature will impact engagement? Remote Config works with A/B Testings so you can set up and run experiments to test changes to your app. Use Remote Config with A/B Testing to understand which changes are worth rolling out widely.A/B testing was built in partnership with Google Optimize, an A/B testing and personalization tool for the web.

Firebase base makes the lives of developers much easier by offering quick and easy customization on the fly. Incorporate Firebase in your applications and unprecedented levels of user personalization.