What is Firebase App Check?
Firebase App Check is a security feature that helps to protect your Firebase resources from misuse. This helps the developer of an app as he has to worry less about his APIs being misused. For example, since every request costs money if certain quotas are reached, misuse can quickly result in additional costs for the app developer.
App Check helps to ensure that only authentic requests can be sent by user clients, thus filtering out abusive requests.
How do we find out whether the traffic is coming from an authentic user?
App Check filters all traffic to our Firebase endpoints and checks whether they are authentic users. So-called attestation providers add a token to the client requests, which is scanned by Firebase. These are located on the user's device.
Depending on the environment, the following providers are used:
- Play Integrity (Android)
- DeviceCheck (iOS)
- Re-Captcha (Web)
After this setup, it is possible to filter out abusive requests and thus secure your own endpoints.
ConclusionApp Check is a nice way for developers to have more security that their own apps are only used by authentic clients and that no third parties can send unwanted requests to their own endpoints in order to manipulate them or increase costs through unnecessary requests.
What is Firebase Remote Config?
Firebase Remote Config is a powerful tool to personalize and improve the user experience by changing app features and content without the need to update the app.
The feature is particularly useful for the following areas of application:
- A/B testing: You can roll out different versions to different groups of users
- Personalization: Certain user groups can receive customized content, e.g. to increase monetization
- Real-time adjustments: React to events in real time (e.g. advertising events)
- No release: There is no need to publish a new release that users first have to install via an update.
How does Firebase Remote Config work?
Configurations are saved in Firebase using key-value pairs, and different configurations can be created. Certain rules can be used to specify that, for example, 30 % users should receive feature A and 70 % feature B. Firebase then randomly selects the devices on which the respective features are rolled out.
There is also the option of rolling out features based on machine learning. The algorithm then decides for which users the feature makes sense. For example, if you want to set different values for power users or provide them with special functions, the algorithm can find these users for you and automatically roll out the feature to them.
ConclusionFirebase Remote Config is an interesting tool for personalizing the user experience and, above all, reducing annoying updates. However, you should keep in mind that these are only text-based changes and that you cannot add completely new functions to an app.
In the next #FrontendFriday, the Firebase series will focus on data storage and which storage makes sense in which context.
