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Google Firebase expands Extensions to become more customisable

Google is extending its Firebase software development platform to allow developers to customise pre-built code extensions themselves.

Google is extending its Firebase software development platform by opening up its pre-built code Extensions, allowing developers to plug directly into the runtime and extend the functionality according to their specific needs.

Announced during Google’s I/O developer event this week, the new functionality, dubbed “Extensions events,” could allow an app developer to trigger discounts through the existing payments Extension, for example, without having to request the feature from the developer themselves.

The announcement of Extension events comes at an interesting time, hot on the heels of Cloudflare’s announcement of Workers for Platforms, which similarly aims to enable customers to customise third-party applications themselves by making them more programmable.

Google is also announcing several new third-party Extensions, such as the ability to enable users to log in to an application using their Snap account, and enable native chat functionality with the Stream Extension.

In addition, the vendor is introducing a new firebase deploy command, allowing users to quickly deploy web apps written in React, Angular, Vue, Next.js, Nuxt, and other popular JavaScript frameworks natively within Firebase.

There are also improvements for documentation, support, and crash reporting for Flutter, the increasingly popular open source framework for natively compiled apps. All Firebase plugins for Flutter are now generally available, including a new and improved Crashlytics plugin. Flutter documentation, snippets, and customer support are all now baked directly into Firebase.

Finally, the Firebase App Distribution feature, which allows users to distribute pre-release versions of an app to user testers, and advanced Performance Monitoring, have both graduated from beta to general availability.