The document presents an overview of Firebase Remote Config, sharing insights on its features, use cases, and some limitations. Peter Tuszynski discusses its capabilities, including conditionals, A/B testing, and rollback options for features in production. Additionally, it highlights caching behavior and provides practical tips for implementing Remote Config effectively.

1. Firebase Remote Config
tips & tricks
28.05.2018
by Peter Tuszynski

2. Agenda for today
1. About me :)
2. Introduction to Firebase Remote Config
3. Interesting features
4. Clever use cases
5. Gotchas!
6. Wrap up
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3. Who am I & why should you care?
• Hi, my name is Peter Tuszynski
• CTO at inFullMobile a digital product design &
development studio
• Ex-founder at a venture backed startup
• Ex-Entrepreneur-In-Residence at a leading venture
fund in Poland
• Working with mobile technologies for over 10 years
• Huge fan of Firebase ;)
@dusker on most of social networks
piotr.tuszynski@infullmobile.com
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4. Introduction to Remote Config
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01

5. Basics
• Essentially a server-side stored JSON file
• On steroids (provided by the SDK)
• Supports the following data types:
• String
• Number
• Bool
• Firebase doesn’t support nested structures natively
in Remote Config
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6. Supported platforms
• iOS
• Android
• REST API
• Not available on the web :(
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7. Defining params
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8. Defining params
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9. Defining params
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10. Retrieving params
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11. Default values?
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12. Retrieving params
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13. Retrieving params
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14. Interesting Remote Config features
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02

15. Conditionals
• You can have different remote config values based
on many different conditions
• OS type
• App version
• Region
• Remote Config + Analytics = <3
• Target based on user properties
• Target based on the audience
• Remote Config + Prediction = <3
• Target based on likelihood to do something in
the next 7 days
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16. REST API
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17. REST API
• Support for both read & write
• You can create your own unofficial Remote Config
for the web
• Supports conditions
• Make sure you create a backup!!! There’s no undo!
• You can validate your JSON by appending
validate_only=true to the request URL
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18. Staged roll out
• Rather than rolling out a specific version in stages
(like Google Play will let you) you may want to roll
out certain features
• Create a flag for a feature, implement the proper
feature visibility in the app
• Gauge the percentile as you see seamless adoption
• Get rid of the conditional once you’re happy with the
rollout
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19. A/B testing
• Extremely powerful tool to perform educated
product related choices
• Firebase supports AB testing natively, out-of-the-box
• Simple definition in the Firebase Console
• You can test multiple variants (ABC tests)
• In the implementation it’s as simple as adding an if-
statement
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20. Clever use cases
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03

21. Switch for a crisis time
•As we all know crisis break out at the least expected
moment
•Your personal kill-switch or at least an off switch that’ll
let you catch a breath :)
•All the giant companies do it (they learned eventually)
•Works especially well with conditioning ie. turn the
app off for a specific region
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22. RACI
•Clients are great, when they pay the bills
•We had situations where clients kept using the app we’ve shared
with them despite not having paid the invoices
•This happened before Firebase was out there, took about 60
man-days to be built
•Now you’re getting it for free! Use it :)
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23. Easy roll-back of a buggy feature
•Often times bugs surface once feature is already in
production, that applies to critical bugs as well
•Every time you launch a new feature have a Remote Config
switch that accompanies it
•If things go south just toggle the switch and the feature gets
hidden until you’re ready with a fix
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24. A few gotchas!
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04

25. Caching
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• Remote Config values get internally cached after a
first successful load
• By default cache expires after 12 hours
• Y o u m a y o v e r r i d e t h i s w i t h
fetchWithExpirationDuration:completionHandler:

26. Throttling
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• Done internally in the SDK
• Threshold is at 5 reads per 60 minutes - anything
after that will get throttled
• To go around this during development time you can
enable developer mode
• F I R R e m o t e C o n f i g S e t t i n g s - >
isDeveloperModeEnabled -> true

27. Limits
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• Up to 2k parameters
• Up to 100 conditions

28. Thank you
@dusker
piotr.tuszynski@infullmobile.com
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