Test Your Game with Firebase Test Lab for Android

Doug Stevenson

Developer Advocate

Testing your application is a great way to help maximize its quality, and many of you know that Firebase Test Lab for Android has some useful tools for testing Android apps. If you're the type of engineer who likes to maximize test coverage by writing instrumented tests (and regular unit tests), you can send those to Test Lab for execution. Even if you don't like writing tests, you have some options. You can record instrumented tests by interacting with your app using Espresso Test Recorder in Android Studio. And there's almost no effort required at all to run a Robo test that automatically crawls your app.

These tests are helpful for data-driven apps because there are robust test frameworks that understand how to navigate the Android platform widgets used to receive input and display data on screen. However, most games don't work with platform widgets. Games typically take over the screen using their own UI elements, and provide their own touch controls. As a result, it's extremely difficult to write instrumented tests for testing games, and Robo test won't know how to navigate the game at all.

To help deal with these challenges with testing games, the Test Lab team has come up with a way for game developers to test their games effectively across many of the devices that Test Lab offers. It's a new type of test called a Game Loop Test, and it's available today in beta.

How does a Game Loop test work?

If you've seen arcade video games operate, you know that they're always showing something on screen, typically some automated demo of the game, called "attract mode". With Firebase Test Lab, game developers can now use this concept of attract mode to construct test scenarios, and Test Lab will arrange for those scenarios to be invoked in sequence. This gives developers the opportunity to test a wide variety of game levels and situations in a single test run on all the devices provided by Test Lab. If there are any problems with a scenario, you'll find out which ones are problematic, so you can focus your efforts on improving that specific case.

Even better, Test Lab now provides performance data with every report. Of particular interest to game developers is a graph of the rendered frame rate over time throughout the test, tied to a video of the device display. This helps you quickly identify the parts of your game that aren't rendering at an acceptable FPS.

In addition to FPS, there are other performance metrics available for all apps. You'll be able to see your app's CPU utilization, memory usage, and network ingress and egress. Notice how you can jump directly to the point in the video where you're observing performance problems.

If you're a game developer, now is a great time to check out Firebase Test Lab for Android to see what it can do to help the quality of your game.

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Supercharge your games with Firebase for Unity and C++

Stewart Miles

Staff Software Engineer

If you haven't heard yet, the Firebase team is at the Game Developers Conference this week to show all you game developers out there how Firebase can make it easier for you to develop successful games. And one of our big announcements at the show is that the official Firebase SDKs for Unity and C++ have now graduated to full General Availability! This means that they're both primary supported platforms that Firebase is committed to supporting in the future.

Both SDKs let you take advantage of:
AdMob: Monetize your games with targeted, in-app advertising, include native ads and rewarded video. Guides: Unity/C++.

Analytics: Record events that happen in your game with our free and unlimited analytics service, now complete with real time views! Guides: Unity/C++

Realtime Database: Magically sync your app's data across all devices, usually within a few hundred milliseconds. Guides: Unity/C++

Dynamic Links: Create mobile deep links that you can use to point players to any element of your game (if they have it installed), or take them to the Play Store / App Store (if they don't). Guides: Unity/C++

Authentication: Sign in your users in from third party providers like Facebook, Google, and Github, or use our built in username and password system. Guides: Unity/C++

Cloud Messaging: Send notifications to iOS, Android and web clients through a single endpoint, or use the Firebase Notifications panel to schedule notifications without having to worry about writing any custom server code or curl calls. Guides: Unity/C++

Remote Config: Tweak variables from the cloud, and then use Firebase Analytics to see if they give you the results you expect. You can even use Remote Config to deliver custom values to specific groups of people, like your expert players. Guides: Unity/C++

Storage: Store user-created binary data in Cloud Storage buckets directly from the app - fantastic for uploading screenshots or videos. Guides: Unity/C++

You can jump in today with our new getting started guide for game developers . As a bonus for developers working in Cocos2D-x, we've also released a set of new samples that demonstrate how to integrate the C++ SDKs into your Cocos2D-x games. As always, if you have questions or comments, reach out to us through our support team, Stack Overflow or the firebase-talkgroup!

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Pirate Metrics (AARRR) with Firebase

Parul Soi

Developer Relations Program Manager

Generating insights from data and acting upon it appropriately can often make or break a company. In the past few years, the field has grown leaps and bounds with a lot more app developers tracking a lot more events. Yet, truth be told, it’s easy to get overloaded with data and, hence, make it tougher for yourself to find what you were looking for.

So, what metrics should you be tracking to help improve your product?

Analytics is a vast field, with several popular practices and frameworks being employed across the world in every industry. One of the most popular frameworks, particularly in the tech products sector, is Pirate Metrics. The term was coined by Dave McClure, founder of 500 Startups, and is very popular amongst product managers and growth hackers across the world for how it simplifies and breaks down a product’s user lifecycle.

In this post, we’ll cover the five metrics that are collectively called Pirate Metrics and understand their importance. In following posts in the series, we will see how we can use Firebase products to boost these metrics and, hence, build more engaging products.

Stage 1

: The first element in user lifecycle of any product is the acquisition, meaning user install your app. Users are acquired in many different ways, either organically, such as through social media communications, App Store optimization, search, news, content marketing etc., or inorganically which is usually ads.

Stage 2

Congratulations, you have acquired a user! However, your job is less than half done and there is still a need to convince the user that the app is worth keeping around. To give yourself the best chance, you want to activate the user by getting them to experience what makes your app special. For example, a game might want the user to go through a training level or a photo filter application might want the user to experiment with any one image.

Stage 3

The biggest challenge most products face is to retain the users that they acquired. A typical person only uses about 26% of their installed apps daily. People tend to either uninstall or simply forget about the applications they downloaded after the first few days. The goal for any new healthy product is to find a strategy to retain them, and have them keep coming back.

Stage 4

You also want your users to be your biggest advocates. No acquisition strategy is as powerful as an organic, referral campaign. If users love your product, they genuinely want their friends to try it out as well, and you want to really encourage your users to do so, and reduce any friction that might stop a user.

Stage 5

Ultimately, you want to monetize your app in order to grow your company and reach more users.

These five stages - Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue are collectively called Pirate Metrics. These are fairly general and can be applied to most digital products. Product managers use a wide variety of tools to track these different metrics. However, with the new Firebase, not only can you track these in one single place, you can also use the suite of different tools to boost them.

We’ll see how in the coming posts. Stay tuned!

Posted by Parul Soi, Developer Relations Program Manager

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