Back in October, we were thrilled to launch a beta version of Firebase Crashlytics. As the top ranked mobile app crash reporter for over 3 years running, Crashlytics helps you track, prioritize, and fix stability issues in realtime. It's been exciting to see all the positive reactions, as thousands of you have upgraded to Crashlytics in Firebase!
Today, we're graduating Firebase Crashlytics out of beta. As the default crash reporter for Firebase going forward, Crashlytics is the next evolution of the crash reporting capabilities of our platform. It empowers you to achieve everything you want to with Firebase Crash Reporting, plus much more.
This release include several major new features in addition to our stamp of approval when it comes to service reliability. Here's what's new.
We heard from many of you that you love Firebase Crash Reporting's "breadcrumbs" feature. (Breadcrumbs are the automatically created Analytics events that help you retrace user actions preceding a crash.) Starting today, you can see these breadcrumbs within the Crashlytics section of the Firebase console, helping you to triage issues more easily.
To use breadcrumbs on Crashlytics, install the latest SDK and enable Google Analytics for Firebase. If you already have Analytics enabled, the feature will automatically start working.
By broadly analyzing aggregated crash data for common trends, Crashlytics automatically highlights potential root causes and gives you additional context on the underlying problems. For example, it can reveal how widespread incorrect UIKit rendering was in your app so you would know to address that issue first. Crash insights allows you to make more informed decisions on what actions to take, save time on triaging issues, and maximize the impact of your debugging efforts.
From our community:
"In the few weeks that we've been working with Crashlytics' crash insights, it's been quite helpful on a few particularly pesky issues. The description and quality of the linked resources makes it easy to immediately start debugging." - Marc Bernstein, Software Development Team Lead, Hudl
- Marc Bernstein, Software Development Team Lead, Hudl
Generally, you have a few builds you care most about, while others aren't as important at the moment. With this new release of Crashlytics, you can now "pin" your most important builds which will appear at the top of the console. Your pinned builds will also appear on your teammates' consoles so it's easier to collaborate with them. This can be especially helpful when you have a large team with hundreds of builds and millions of users.
To show you stability issues, Crashlytics automatically uploads your dSYM files in the background to symbolicate your crashes. However, some complex situations can arise (i.e. Bitcode compiled apps) and prevent your dSYMs from being uploaded properly. That's why today we're also releasing a new dSYM uploader tool within your Crashlytics console. Now, you can manually upload your dSYM for cases where it cannot be automatically uploaded.
With today's GA release of Firebase Crashlytics, we've decided to sunset Firebase Crash Reporting, so we can best serve you by focusing our efforts on one crash reporter. Starting today, you'll notice the console has changed to only list Crashlytics in the navigation. If you need to access your existing crash data in Firebase Crash Reporting, you can use the app picker to switch from Crashlytics to Crash Reporting.
Firebase Crash Reporting will continue to be functional until September 8th, 2018 - at which point it will be retired fully.
Upgrading to Crashlytics is easy: just visit your project's console, choose Crashlytics in the left navigation and click "Set up Crashlytics":
If you're currently using both Firebase and Fabric, you can now link the two to see your existing crash data within the Firebase console. To get started, click "Link app in Fabric" within the console and go through the flow on fabric.io:
If you are only using Fabric right now, you don't need to take any action. We'll be building out a new flow in the coming months to help you seamlessly link your existing app(s) from Fabric to Firebase. In the meantime, we encourage you to try other Firebase products.
We are excited to bring you the best-in class crash reporter in the Firebase console. As always, let us know your thoughts and we look forward to continuing to improve Crashlytics. Happy debugging!
Today, as part of Mobile World Congress 2018, we are excited to announce the first beta release of Flutter. Flutter is Google's new mobile UI framework that helps developers craft high-quality native interfaces for both iOS and Android. Get started today at flutter.io to build beautiful native apps in record time.
Flutter targets the sweet spot of mobile development: performance and platform integrations of native mobile, with high-velocity development and multi-platform reach of portable UI toolkits.
Designed for both new and experienced mobile developers, Flutter can help you build beautiful and successful apps in record time with benefits such as:
Since our alpha release last year, we delivered, with help from our community, features such as screen reader support and other accessibility features, right-to-left text, localization and internationalization, iPhone X and iOS 11 support, inline video, additional image format support, running Flutter code in the background, and much more.
Our tools also improved significantly, with support for Android Studio, Visual Studio Code, new refactorings to help you manage your widget code, platform interop to expose the power of mobile platforms to Flutter code, improved stateful hot reloads, and a new widget inspector to help you browse the widget tree.
Thanks to the many new features across the framework and tools, teams across Google (such as AdWords) and around the world have been successful with Flutter. Flutter has been used in production apps with millions of installs, apps built with Flutter have been featured in the App Store and Play Store (for example, Hamilton: The Musical), and startups and agencies have been successful with Flutter.
For example, Codemate, a development agency in Finland, attributes Flutter's high-velocity dev cycle and customizable UI toolkit to their ability to quickly build a beautiful app for Hookle. "We now confidently recommend Flutter to help our clients perform better and deliver more value to their users across mobile," said Toni Piirainen, CEO of Codemate.
Apps built with Flutter deliver quality, performance, and customized designs across platforms.
Flutter's beta also works with a pre-release of Dart 2, with improved support for declaring UI in code with minimal language ceremony. For example, Dart 2 infers new and const to remove boilerplate when building UI. Here is an example:
// Before Dart 2 Widget build(BuildContext context) { return new Container( height: 56.0, padding: const EdgeInsets.symmetric(horizontal: 8.0), decoration: new BoxDecoration(color: Colors.blue[500]), child: new Row( ... ), ); } // After Dart 2 Widget build(BuildContext context) => Container( height: 56.0, padding: EdgeInsets.symmetric(horizontal: 8.0), decoration: BoxDecoration(color: Colors.blue[500]), child: Row( ... ), );
widget.dart on GitHub
We're thrilled to see Flutter's ecosystem thriving. There are now over 1000 packages that work with Flutter (for example: SQLite, Firebase, Facebook Connect, shared preferences, GraphQL, and lots more), over 1700 people in our chat, and we're delighted to see our community launch new sites such as Flutter Institute, Start Flutter, and Flutter Rocks. Plus, you can now subscribe to the new Flutter Weekly newsletter, edited and published by our community.
As we look forward to our 1.0 release, we are focused on stabilization and scenario completion. Our roadmap, largely influenced by our community, currently tracks features such as making it easier to embed Flutter into an existing app, inline WebView, improved routing and navigation APIs, additional Firebase support, inline maps, a smaller core engine, and more. We expect to release new betas approximately every four weeks, and we highly encourage you to vote (👍) on issues important to you and your app via our issue tracker.
Now is the perfect time to try Flutter. You can go from zero to your first running Flutter app quickly with our Getting Started guide. If you already have Flutter installed, you can switch to the beta channel using these instructions.
We want to extend our sincere thanks for your support, feedback, and many contributions. We look forward to continuing this journey with everyone, and we can't wait to see what you build!