Google makes sharing progress in Firebase projects easier

Google has added a couple of new features to its development platform Firebase, such as making it easier to test authentication steps and share preview versions with other developers. There are also new features to make performance analytics more transparent.

Authentication emulator

One of the new features is the authentication emulator. When a developer is testing an application in the Firebase Emulator Suite, Authentication Emulator enables them to test the entire user management process on local machines.

“You can also use the new auth emulator to run integration tests that rely on authentication,” Product Director Francis Ma said. “The Emulator Suite, now with Firebase Authentication, allows you to shift to a local-first developer workflow so you can experiment and rapidly iterate without touching production data, incurring costs, or worrying that you’ll break something.”

Preview channels and extensions

Developers can also use the latest version to create preview channels to preview their work and share previews with their colleagues. All the developer needs to do to share a preview, is share a link.

Google also built a couple of new extensions for Firebase. These include for the Stripe payment platform and an extension to see of ither developers are currently online.

Performance analytics

To give developers a better understanding of the performance and stability of their applications, Google has built the Performance Monitoring Dashboard. This customizable dashboard should make this data a lot more transparent.

New APIs for Google Analytics

A couple of new APIs allow Firebase to be better tuned to the needs of its users. For example, the Google Analytics 4 Measurement Protocol allows events to be tracked in Google Analytics. The Data API allows programs to access the data in Google Analytics directly, and the Admin API makes it possible to edit user permissions from other environments.