As you're developing your Apple app using Firebase, you might discover concepts that are unfamiliar or specific to Firebase. This page aims to answer those questions or point you to resources to learn more.
If you have questions about a topic not covered on this page, feel free to visit one of our online communities. We'll also update this page with new topics periodically, so check back to see if we've added the topic you want to learn about!
Firebase library support by platform
The following table describes which Firebase libraries are compatible with which Apple platforms. For the time being, visionOS and watchOS are community-supported only. See the Firebase Apple platforms SDK GitHub repository for installation instructions and known issues.
| Library | iOS | macOS | Mac Catalyst |
tvOS | visionOS | watchOS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A/B Testing | ||||||
| Firebase AI Logic 1 | iOS 15+ | macOS 12+ | Catalyst 15+ | tvOS 15+ (Community support only) | watchOS 8+ | |
| Analytics | v8.9.0+ | v8.9.0+ | v8.9.0+ | |||
| Analytics without Ad ID | v8.9.0+ | v8.9.0+ | v8.9.0+ | |||
| Analytics on-device conversion | ||||||
| App Check DeviceCheck provider | watchOS 9+ | |||||
| App Check App Attest provider | iOS 14+ | macOS 11+ | Catalyst 14+ | tvOS 15+ | watchOS 9+ | |
| App Check custom and debug providers | ||||||
| App Distribution | ||||||
| Authentication | partial | partial | partial | partial | partial | |
| Cloud Firestore | Source distros only | |||||
| Cloud Functions | ||||||
| Cloud Messaging | ||||||
| Cloud Storage | ||||||
| Crashlytics | ||||||
| Data Connect | ||||||
| Dynamic Links | ||||||
| Firebase installations | ||||||
| Firebase ML Model Downloader | ||||||
| In-App Messaging | ||||||
| Performance Monitoring | ||||||
| Realtime Database | ||||||
| Remote Config |
1 Firebase AI Logic was formerly called "Vertex AI in Firebase".
App Clips
Most Firebase libraries will build and run in an App Clip target, however, many are restricted as a result of underlying OS restrictions. Known issues include:
- Dynamic Links cannot send users to an App Clip if they tap a link without the app installed.
- Firestore and Realtime Database cannot load data in App Clips due to an underlying CFStream dependency.
See the Firebase GitHub repository for a full list of known App Clip issues.
GoogleService-Info.plist
As part of adding Firebase to your Apple project, you need to add the
GoogleService-Info.plist configuration file to your project. If you want to
use multiple Firebase projects in a single app, visit the documentation for
configuring multiple projects.
See the Swift reference documentation to learn about the Firebase app initialization process in more detail.
Swift Package Manager
Learn more about Swift Package Manager integration in our guide.
Swift Extensions
Firebase Apple platform SDK Swift extensions were formerly small, open source add-ons to the existing Firebase Apple platform libraries that enable your code to use Swift language-specific features. These APIs have since been added directly to the main libraries and don't need to be included separately. If you formerly had a Swift extension SDK in your codebase, see the migration guide for upgrade instructions.
SwiftUI
Firebase fully supports SwiftUI, though the setup will be slightly different from UIKit apps in order for Firebase to function correctly in a fully SwiftUI environment. Take a look at this blog post by Peter Friese for more details.
SwiftUI applications must disable swizzling due to a known issue. See the app delegate swizzling section for more details.
App delegate swizzling
Firebase swizzles some methods in your app's app delegate class to
automatically connect certain Firebase services to OS callbacks, like
FCM and the APNs token. You can disable swizzling in your app by
adding the flag FirebaseAppDelegateProxyEnabled in the app’s Info.plist file
and setting it to NO.
Four Firebase products use App Delegate swizzling: Analytics, App Distribution, Authentication, and FCM. If you've disabled swizzling in your application and you use any of the following products, refer to the product-specific guide to learn about how to use the product without swizzling:
Supporting iOS 14
iOS 14 includes new changes to user permissions surrounding the user's advertising identifier. See the preparing for iOS 14 guide for more details on whether or not your app may be affected.
Ongoing support for Objective-C
To ease maintenance of our Apple platforms documentation, Firebase has decided to concentrate on Swift snippets and code samples in our guides and other developer materials. Objective-C snippets will be removed from our guides starting January 1, 2024. We will continue to maintain up-to-date reference documentation for Objective-C for all Firebase products.
Open source resources for Firebase Apple platform SDKs
Firebase supports open source development, and we encourage community contributions and feedback.
Firebase Apple platform SDKs
All Firebase SDKs for Apple platforms except Analytics are developed as open source libraries in our public Firebase GitHub repository.
FirebaseUI
FirebaseUI is a set of utility libraries built on Firebase, including a drop-in UI flow for authentication and data utilities for Cloud Firestore and Realtime Database. See more details about FirebaseUI on our GitHub page.
Quickstart samples
Firebase maintains a collection of quickstart samples for most Firebase APIs on iOS. Find these quickstarts in our public Firebase GitHub quickstart repository.
You can open each quickstart in Xcode, then run them on a mobile device or simulator. Or you can use these quickstarts as example code for using Firebase SDKs.