When Test Lab was originally launched with Firebase in 2016, it supported only Android devices. At Google I/O 2018 in May, Test Lab launched closed beta support for iOS. This included a limited set of iOS devices and a basic UI.

Building comprehensive tests for Android involves writing code, using Espresso and UIAutomator, that acts as a sort of "remote control" for your app. Similarly, on iOS, testing is performed using XCTests. In both cases, Test Lab can run your tests against actual devices in a cloud-hosted device farm.

At the Firebase Summit in Prague at the end of October, the Test Lab team announced general availability of support for iOS, including ten models of iPhones and iPads running seven different versions of iOS, including iOS 12. We have also improved the iOS documentation and console experience for you.

Test Lab also launched a number of improvements to Robo, a tool which runs fully automated tests against your app running on Android devices. Here's what's new with Robo.

Monkey actions

Games are difficult to crawl because they often have a highly customized UI, rather than using system widgets. This makes it difficult for Robo to crawl the game's experience. Now, if Robo detects that the app under test is actually a game, it will perform random taps and swipes in an effort to interact with the game's UI. This can yield useful crash and performance data and is an early but significant step towards more meaningful automated game crawling.

Private APIs detection

Test Lab now detects and warns if your APK makes use of internal Android APIs. On Android P and newer, using such APIs can crash your app. Whenever such an API is accessed during a Robo crawl a stack trace is recorded in the device logs. This pinpoints the location in your app's code where the violation occurs.

"Stuck on porch" warnings

Test Lab now warns developers when it notices that Robo got stuck in a crawl. For example, if the user is presented with a complicated sign-up form or a login screen, it may be difficult for Robo to satisfy the requirements of the form. In situations like this, Robo will suggest an action to the developer to help it continue a full crawl, such as providing test credentials or writing a Robo Script.

If you aren't in the habit of regularly testing your app, consider giving Test Lab a try at no cost using the free daily quota of tests. No coding is necessary to run a Robo test on Android - just upload your APK to get started. And be sure to let us know what you think in the #test-lab channel of the Firebase Slack.

"How can I get rid of the Remote Config cache?"

As the Product Manager of Firebase Remote Config, a product that helps you modify your app without deploying a new version, I spend a lot of time talking to our customers, and one of the most common requests I hear is, "Can I get rid of the Remote Config cache and fetch new values right away?"

While we can't get rid of the cache entirely -- caching ensures that the Remote Config service stays up and running, free of charge, no matter how many millions of users you have -- thanks to some new features we've added to Cloud Functions for Firebase, you can now ensure that your users always get fresh Remote Config values whenever they open your app!

Clearing up some caching confusion

Before we get into our solution, let me explain why the problem isn't as bad as you think, by looking at a typical app that has a Remote Config cache time set to 4 hours. You might think that, if this app developer publishes new Remote Config values, most of their users won't see these new values until several hours later.

But the fact is, the vast majority of their users will see the new Remote Config results as soon as they run the app! Remember, the way the cache works is that it looks at the last time Remote Config successfully fetched data. So anybody who last opened their app more than 4 hours ago will retrieve fresh data.

To put it another way, if your user opens up your app at 7:00 pm, you push out new values at midnight, and then they open up your app again at 12:15 am, Remote Config will fetch your new values from the server. Sure, it's only been 15 minutes since you published your values, but their cache is over 5 hours old, so Remote Config will fetch fresh values.

Nevertheless, I understand that it's really important for many of you to push out new changes to all of your users right away. Maybe you want feature flags to be disabled quickly. Or, maybe you have time-sensitive values, like marketing campaigns or a flash sale, in which case it would be awkward for your users to still see messaging for a sale that's no longer running.

Adding Remote Config triggers to Cloud Functions

Fortunately, we've built a new integration with Cloud Functions for Firebase that will make it easier for you to build custom behavior based on events that happen in Remote Config. Specifically, you can now use new triggers to write code that runs whenever your team publishes Remote Config values -- whether that's through the Firebase Console or the REST API.

There are a number of ways you can use these Remote Config triggers. One significant way is to use them to notify all of your apps as soon as a new set of values get published on Remote Config.

Using Cloud Functions to update Remote Config

If you're interested in learning how to implement this feature, here's a high level overview of the process:

1. First, you need to make sure your clients are using both Firebase Remote Config and Firebase Cloud Messaging.
2. Next, create a Cloud Function that is triggered whenever somebody on your team publishes new values to Remote Config. Again, this will happen whether that's done using the Firebase Console, or through the REST API.
3. Your Cloud Function then sends a silent, data-only notification to all of your clients, using Firebase Cloud Messaging, telling them that there's new Remote Config data ready to be read.
4. When your clients receive this message, they simply record a local flag noting that the Remote Config data they have is stale and needs to be updated.
5. The next time your app is brought back into the foreground, it fetches fresh values immediately from Remote Config servers (if that local flag exists), and uses default Remote Config fetching behavior otherwise.
6. Once the fetch is complete, your app resets that local flag.

For more information, check out the solutions guide in our documentation. This guide contains all of the code samples you'll need, both in your Cloud Function, and on the client.

Fresh updates without the throttle

You might be wondering why you can't just a) set your Remote Config cache to 0 all the time, or b) have your clients go and always retrieve the new Remote Config values as soon as they receive the notification.

The answer is that Remote Config still needs to make sure the service is usable (and free) by all apps, and we've set up both client and server-side throttles to make sure that no single app accidentally abuses the service. By sticking with the default caching time when there's no local flag indicating that there's new config available, you can avoid any client-side throttles. Your app will have a faster start-up time, too, by avoiding unnecessary network calls.

By waiting until your client goes into the foreground to fetch these new values, you avoid any server-side throttles. You'll also avoid having your clients make unnecessary network calls in the background, which means your app uses less data overall, which makes your users happier, particularly in areas of the world where data usage is expensive.

By making sure your apps are still well-behaved, you can still get the freshest possible Remote Config values while avoiding any throttles that might be applied to your app. Please consult our caching & throttling documentation for further information on this topic.

No polling needed, either!

One other advantage of using this system is that if your app in the foreground when it receives this notification, you can immediately act on this information - perhaps by fetching the new Remote Config data and prompting the user to refresh their screen. So those of you who were actively polling the Remote Config service while your app was in the foreground no longer need to resort to any of those network calls anymore.

Other uses for Cloud Functions and Remote Config

Of course, this isn't the only use for Remote Config triggers and Cloud Functions - just one of the most requested, for sure! A number of developers also want to know when new Remote Config values have been pushed to the Firebase console, and you can use Cloud Functions to send off an email to your team or push a message in a Slack channel.

You could also use Cloud Functions to keep different projects in sync. For instance, you could use a cloud function to copy a set of Remote Config values from your production project to your development or testing project.

Give it a try!

If you're interested in giving this new approach a try, we encourage you to read over the full documentation in the solutions guide. As always, if you have other questions about Remote Config or other feature requests, we're happy to hear your feedback. Please reach out to us in the Firebase Talk group, or on Stack Overflow.

If you're building or looking to build a visual app, you'll love ML Kit's new face contour detection. With ML Kit, you can take advantage of many common Machine Learning (ML) use-cases, such as detecting faces using computer vision. Need to know where to put a hat on a head in a photo? Want to place a pair of glasses over the eyes? Or maybe just a monocle over the left eye. It's all possible with ML Kit's face detection. In this post we'll cover the new face contour feature that allows you to build better visual apps on both Android or iOS.

Detect facial contours

With just a few configuration options you can now detect detailed contours of a face. Contours are a set of over 100 points that outline the face and common features such as the eyes, nose and mouth. You can see them in the image below. Note that as the subject raises his eyebrows, the contour dots move to match it. These points are how advanced camera apps set creative filters and artistic lenses over a user's face.

Setting up the face detector to detect these points only takes a few lines of code.

lazy var vision = Vision.vision()
let options = VisionFaceDetectorOptions()
options.contourMode = .all
let faceDetector = vision.faceDetector(options: options)

The contour points can update in realtime as well. To achieve an ideal frame rate the face detector is configured with the fast mode by default.

When you're ready to detect points in a face, send an image or a buffer to ML Kit for processing.

faceDetector.process(visionImage) { faces, error in
  guard error == nil, let faces = faces, !faces.isEmpty else { return }
  for face in faces {
    if let faceContour = face.contour(ofType: .face) {
      for point in faceContour.points {
        print(point.x) // the x coordinate
        print(point.y) // the y coordinate
      }
   }
}      

ML Kit will then give you an array of points that are the x and y coordinates of the contours in the same scale as the image.

Detect the location of facial features

The face detector can also detect landmarks within faces. A landmark is just an umbrella term for facial features like your nose, eyes, ears, and mouth. We've dramatically improved its performance since launching ML Kit at I/O!

To detect landmarks configure the face detector with the landmarkMode option:

lazy var vision = Vision.vision()
let options = VisionFaceDetectorOptions()
options.landmarkMode = .all
let faceDetector = vision.faceDetector(options: options)

Then pass an image into the detector to receive and process the coordinates of the detected landmarks.

faceDetector.process(visionImage) { faces, error in
  guard error == nil, let faces = faces, !faces.isEmpty else { return }
  for face in faces {
    // check for the presence of a left eye
    if let leftEye = face.landmark(ofType: .leftEye) {
      // TODO: put a monocle over the eye [monocle emoji]
      print(leftEye.position.x) // the x coordinate
      print(leftEye.position.y) // the y coordinate
    }
  }
}

We can't wait to see what you'll build with ML Kit

Hopefully these new features can empower you to easily build smarter features into your visual apps. Check out our docs for iOS or Android to learn all about face detection with ML Kit. Happy building!