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man: As a lot of developers know,
there's more to having an app succeed
than just building a great app.
You want your app to be dynamic and responsive
by delivering fresh content to users
and quickly reacting to their changing needs.
You want to test out major decisions
to make sure you're doing the right thing
before you push them to your entire audience.
And, ideally, you want to provide a tailored experience
for each user
so your VIPs feel like, well, VIPs.
But let's be honest; that can be a lot of work.
And if you're a developer without a ton of resources,
that's time you'd rather spend on other things,
like building your app.
That's where Firebase Remote Config comes in.
Firebase Remote Config is a simple key value store
that lives in the cloud,
but don't let that simplicity fool you.
Because it lives in the cloud, it means you're able
to deploy changes that your app can read
within a matter of minutes.
For instance, say you've just pushed your app out to the world
and you suddenly discover that your Swedish text
contains some offensive language.
How are you supposed to know? You don't speak Swedish.
I don't blame you.
But fixing that text the old-fashioned way
would mean creating a new build
and going through the entire publishing process again.
That's something that could take days,
which is an awfully long time
to have 9.2 million people cursing your name.
But if your app uses Firebase Remote Config,
you could change that text in the cloud
through the Firebase console, kind of like this.
The next time your users fire up their app,
Remote Config will grab the latest values,
update your app's text, and just like that,
you've averted a major international crisis.
Or let's say you've got a puzzle game
and you're hearing complaints from your players
that level five is too hard.
If you've configured your app using Remote Config,
you could tweak those settings
to give your players a few more turns
and push out that change to the world.
But hang on.
Are you sure that's the right thing to do?
What if the silent majority of your users
actually enjoy the challenge of a more difficult level
and by making it easier, you're gonna turn away
your most hardcore
and potentially highest-paying customers?
How could you test whether or not
this change is a good one?
Sounds like you need an A/B test.
That's where Remote Config's
audience segmentation feature comes in.
This allows you to deliver different configurations
to different groups of users simultaneously.
So you can try out your new level settings
with half your users
while keeping the old settings with the other half.
But audience segmentation
isn't just great for A/B testing.
Maybe you've got a feature change
that could have a major impact on your in-app economy.
Or maybe you just want a double-check
that some new networking code
isn't going to set your servers on fire.
You can use Firebase Remote Config
to gradually roll out these changes,
trying them first with a small percentage of your users
before pushing them out to your entire audience.
Remote Config can also deliver
different configuration sets to your users
based on all sorts of different factors,
from device type or locale
to any audience segment you've defined
in Firebase Analytics.
So you can send out one welcome message
to your New Zealand customers
and another to your Australian ones
or only show your "review this app" button
to people who use your app every day,
or you can change your home screen experience
for your customers who have spent
large amounts of money on in-app purchases
so they feel special.
Remote Config is backed by a client library
on iOS and Android that handles important tasks
like caching, dealing with flaky connections,
and keeping network requests lightweight,
which is always a good thing.
To give Remote Config a try,
check out our documentation here.
We can't wait to see what you build.