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 this flag. If it's set to true, your app can perform a fetch with a cache time of 0 to ensure an immediate fetch. Just make sure you set this flag back when you're done, so your app can resume its usual caching behavior. You might be tempted to have your clients respond to this incoming notification by immediately waking up and fetching new values from the Remote Config service, but if every instance of your app did that at once, there's a very good chance it will hit the server-side throttle, so I don't recommend this.

Firebase Remote Config loading strategies