Firstly I am not sure APIs is the right place to post this but I didn’t know where I should post it.
Anyway I have just started to tap into the world of Firebase and already I can see that it is a deep and vast pool. I can see that there are several plugins available in Bubble but I don’t see anything which gives an overview of what Firebase does and what Bubble can access (and how). Without knowing the full extent of what Firebase offers at this point I have identified a few things I will want to do in my App:
Push Notifications (in my Android app only as I understand it). FYI this was built with BDK Native.
Dynamic Links (and specifically creating them from my within Bubble App). This is my current priority.
Mobile Analytics (perhaps though I need to understand this a bit more first). A quick-and-easy solution if available might be a good start.
Any help in getting a sense of this space in general and how Bubble can access/interface with it, specifically, but not limited to these items, would be hugely helpful.
And any tips of the best and easiest ways to do these things of course would be great.
Do you mean Firebase (the whole mobile/web ecosystem) or just parts of it like Cloud Firestore etc
The former is very SDK based, which doesn’t help us on Bubble without some additions.
However they do provide REST APIs for most of the functions, even if they are not always all that simple to use (as Google assumes you are a coder, so obviously have an SDK to hand).
So yes, you can set up a Dynamic Link via Bubble API … but then they don’t do a huge amount as they are received in code to navigate an app.
Yes, you can write to Cloud Firestore (or the Real Time Database) but you don’t get the benefits of the push data in Bubble like you would if you had the SDK.
Yes, you can use Firebase Cloud messaging to push notifications to iOS or Android apps but (again, without addition of something to you mobile wrapped Bubble app) it is going to be difficult.
It can be really useful if you want a Mobile App to front some Bubble back end.
Thanks @NigelG for your insight and @J805 for your reply.
I guess the most pressing/potentially useful element of this for me (and I would have thought Bubble users generally) would be the mobile analytics.
I am surprised nobody has created a plugin to make this available. Or perhaps there is a more fundamental reason that this wouldn’t work that I am missing?
Also for anyone who is interested the BDK Native option does open access to Firebase push notifications as well as dynamic links. I am using the latter but not yet the former. Note that this requires the BDK Build and not just the plugin. @gaurav should be able to help anyone who has questions on that front.
I wasn’t able to replicate much on the firebase front. However, I might have mentioned this already, but I create my own analytics within my app.
I have used a datatype called Analytics and just saved data based on what I want to track. This way, I don’t need to track IP addresses or anything like that. I don’t need to use cookies either. For me personally, I don’t want to collect data from my users. I want to keep it all anonymous. Easier to abide by the California laws that way. They are strict about cookies and collecting data.
For example, how many people visit a page, how many people press a specific button, etc.
I just do the workflows on the backend so it doesn’t slow down the user experience.
Piggybacking on this thread- I’m trying to log conversion events on Firebase for my native Android bubble app. (thanks @gaurav / BDK for getting me set up a year ago as a native app)
I successfully log conversion events in Google Analytics when people are on my web app but also want to track conversions (e.g. a successful subscription) when people are in the native app. This is the code I run for Google Analytics conversion:
Anyone know if it’s possible to have the same conversion tracking in Firebase? Here’s what I was looking at but not sure how to translate it into something for my app (I don’t know javascript, just copy/pasted the above). Registra eventi | Google Analytics for Firebase
I’m on BDK as well but the dynamic links Firebase spits out aren’t readable by Bubble apps, which unfortunately is the whole reason I was using it. Ex: they include seemingly random characters and percentage signs like “%3D”. Bubble’s “get data from URL” requires a very specific format. Have you run into the same problem?
