Hey there, iOS Developers!

We wanted to let you know that Firebase version 3.6 is now available for iOS. This contains a number of important bug fixes and features needed for iOS 10 support, and we encourage you to run a pod update (or manually update your frameworks) and recompile your projects at your earliest convenience.

If you want to see a full list of fixes and improvements, you can review the release notes, but here’s a quick summary of what’s new.

New Notification Support

Firebase Cloud Messaging now has support for the new iOS 10 user notifications. If your app is running on iOS 10, you can handle incoming notifications using the userNotificationCenter:willPresentNotification: withCompletionHandler method. And don’t worry — if your app only has the older application:didReceiveRemoteNotification: completionHandler methods supported, APNs will call those instead if it can’t find the newer ones. Need more info? Refer to the updated FCM documentation for more information.

Some Notes Around App Review Guidelines

With the iOS 10 update, Apple made a number of changes to their App Store review guidelines. The latest version of Firebase has made several changes in response to these new guidelines. Most importantly, you should no longer encounter iTunes Connect errors asking you to provide text for things like NSCalendarsUsageDescription and NSBluetoothPeripheralUsageDescription.

One consequence of following these guidelines is that we have removed the technology which up until recently gave you the ability to measure iOS Search app install ads from Safari.

For those of you who are using Firebase Invites, you will need to supply some content for NSContactsUsageDescription in your plist file. Firebase Invites uses this contact information to populate the list of friends that your user might want to send an invitation to.

Of course, this is an ongoing process. We will monitor the impact of these changes closely, and publish further updates if it ever becomes necessary.

Sign-in Workarounds

You may recall in a recent blog post that Firebase Auth was encountering errors in Xcode 8 due to it not being able to write values to the keychain in the simulator. While that issue still exists, we have developed a workaround where we use NSUserDefaults in the simulator, and continue to use the keychain on the device. This means you can now develop and test out Firebase Auth in the simulator and everything should be working again.

Bug Fixes

You found bugs; we fixed ‘em! Please continue to report any issues or feature requests you might have to our online form, and we’ll make sure they get handled appropriately.

And if you have any questions, you can always ask them on Stack Overflow with the Firebase tag, or send them to our Google group.

Thanks again for being a Firebase developer! Now go forth and update your apps!