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Showing posts from February, 2019

Tips for working with Firebase Remote Config

Caching As long as we're talking about loading strategies, let me hit on a related topic; caching. It sometimes confuses developers that values from remote config are cached for 12 hours instead of being grabbed immediately every time you call fetch(). And while you can reduce this cache time somewhat, if you start making network calls too frequently, your app might start getting throttled, either by the client, or the Remote Config service. Obviously, while you're developing and testing your Remote Config implementation, this can be inconvenient, which is why you can override the local throttling behavior by turning on developer mode . Force Update of Remote Config With Firebase Cloud Messaging, you can send a data-only notification to all of your devices, letting them know that there's an urgent update pending. Your apps can respond to this incoming notification by storing some kind of flag locally. The next time your user starts up your app, it can look for thi...

Google Play Store now open for Progressive Web Apps

Chrome 72 for Android shipped the long-awaited Trusted Web Activity (TWA) feature, which means we can now distribute PWAs in the Google Play Store! Is TWA a Hybrid framework, similar to Cordova? No. With Cordova or other hybrid solutions, you are typically shipping your web resources (HTML, JS, CSS, etc.) within your APK package. Also, the engine is different and isolated from the users’ browser, so no session or cache sharing. With Trusted Web Activity you don’t need to package any resource file from your PWA (only native components, in case you want them); all your resources will be downloaded and updated on the fly from your Service Worker. Your PWA will still be rendered with the installed Chrome version, sharing all storage, cache, and sessions with the browser. Therefore, if your user has a session on your website opened when the user installs the app from the Play Store, she will still be logged in. The user is just installing a shortcut to Chrome using a special mode. How...