Join us for the monthly mini-profiles on Firebase team members, aka “Firebasers”, from all around the world! Learn about their backgrounds, how they got started with Firebase, what Firebase products they work on, their favorite ways to de-stress, advice, and more.
For our first feature, we’re happy to introduce you to a long standing member of the Firebase community. You may know his work from Firebase Release Notes, one of his talks at Google events, or used one of his many community responses from Stack Overflow. And now, we give you puf!
How did you get started with Firebase?
I was in the habit of answering questions on Stack Overflow to learn about interesting new technologies, when questions about Firebase started showing up. My answers got noticed, and that led to me becoming a member of the Firebase team at Google. And 7 years later, answering questions about Firebase on Stack Overflow is still one of my favorite things to do each day!
Not sure if it counts as a nickname, but I am known as puf. While I respond to both Frank and puf equally, I'm usually the only puf in the room. I got the nickname in my teens, as I was really tired of all the variations of my last name, and I've been known as “puf” to most people since then.
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.
What is Remote Config personalization?
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.
How does Remote Config personalization differ from A/B testing?
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.
When should you use A/B testing vs. Remote Config personalization?
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.”
How to set up personalization in your app
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:
Show an ad after every level completed
Show an ad after every three levels completed
Show an ad after every seven levels completed
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.
A few months ago, we released Firestore for Games into open alpha. Thanks to all of your feedback, today, we're happy to announce that Cloud Firestore for Games is now publicly available in beta for C++ and Unity developers.
Firestore is a new performant and scalable serverless database option from Firebase for all your game development needs. It can help you add guilds to your latest mobile game, build a backend for your next big turn-based game, or add realtime chat. It’s also a key component of Firebase Extensions like Translate Text and Trigger Email, making it easier than ever to deploy pre-built complex workflows to your games.
What is Cloud Firestore?
Cloud Firestore is Google’s next generation cloud NoSQL database. It’s fast, reliable, and ready to scale for whatever workload you send its way. For the past two years it’s been generally available for the Web, iOS, and Android, and now it’s available for game developers as well.
Cloud Firestore exists alongside our existing Realtime Database. We’ll continue to support Realtime Database because it still works great for when you need to share data quickly with lots of players in near realtime. With Firestore you get more advanced queries on your data, 99.999% guaranteed uptime, and support for up to a million concurrent players -- all whilst remaining fast enough for many of your gaming backend needs. If you need more help deciding which database is right for you, check out this helpful guide.
Wasn’t Cloud Firestore already available?
Even though Firestore has been generally available for some time, the existing SDKs were built with the workflows and tools favored by app and web developers. Although game developers working in languages like JavaScript, Kotlin, and Swift would have no problem adopting the existing development kits, you would’ve had to jump through hoops to access them from Unity or C++. However, here at Firebase and Google, we want to make it easy for game developers to build, release, and operate games. So, we've built SDKs that bring game developers the same levels of convenience that app developers enjoy.
What’s changed since Alpha?
The Beta tag means that we believe that the Firestore SDKs for Unity and C++ are now stable enough that game developers can confidently use them in shipping games. Bugs and small API tweaks may crop up here and there as more developers pick it up, but Firestore is now a viable option when starting new game projects.
A big improvement that alpha testers might notice is that the new libraries have full feature parity with the platform specific Firestore SDKs. This includes many features alpha testers have asked for, such as OnSnapshotsInSync and support for the Blob data type. All transforms (like incrementing values) and query types (like "array-contains-any") are now implemented as well. We’ve also worked to make Firestore more consistent with the other Unity Firebase SDKs by ensuring that events fire on the main thread and adding more consistency to error reporting.
Since we’ve seen that many game developers tend to target multiple platforms with a single codebase, we’ve ensured that every feature in Firestore SDK C++ SDK works identically on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux. This means that you can develop your game logic on a desktop computer with access to the entire Firestore for games feature set, and remain confident that it will continue to function on your target device. We've also fully opened sourced the C++ SDK so you can easily build, debug, and port your code to wherever you need.
How do I get it?
This Firestore beta, like the alpha, ships with the standard Firebase C++ and Unity SDKs. To use it, simply ensure you’re using the latest Firebase SDK either by downloading the C++ zip or the Unity zip. Remember, if you come across any bugs, report them to us through our support channel or on the C++ or Unity issue pages.
ML Kit for Firebase helps power many of these experiences, including adidas’ new in-store shopping experience for their London store. Shoppers can scan products on their phones while they are in the store and the app lets them check stock and request their size without the need for queues.
If you’ve used ML Kit for Firebase to create a great user experience, or if you’ve got a great idea for how you might use it, submit your ideaby December 2! You can also check out more examples on the Android Developers blog.