The Google I/O app is fantastic. The Google team spends a lot of time including a lot of their engineering and design best practices into the app every year – and it shows. It’s easy to use, pretty to look at and it’s damn useful. Now all developers can have a look under the hood with Google releasing the source code.
As Google notes, they relied heavily on Firebase for the Google I/O 2017 app including the implementation of the Firebase Realtime Database (RTDB) and Cloud Functions for Firebase which was used to power the reservation system Google used for sessions at the conference. The RTDB implementation was synced to users badges via NFC which were scanned by staff on the door at the various talks – and from an attendee point of view it worked really well.
Google also used ‘Feed’ in the app this year giving hourly updates to both local and remote attendees updating them using RTDB as well. Developers can get a look at how Google used the Cloud Messaging feature to send messages to users once the data on the server was updated.
If you’re a developer and interested in seeing what Google did at I/O you can check it out now on GitHub.
