Firebase doesn't show connected user - firebase

Question

I'm learning to work with Firebase within Unity.
1. What I've done so far -
1.1 Created a Firebase and Unity project
1.2 copied the json file into Assets folder
1.3 imported Firebase packages
1.4 downloaded jdk-8 and created JAVA_HOME variable
1.5 Created a c# script and put it into a gameobject (from the Firebase tutorial)
FirebaseApp.CheckAndFixDependenciesAsync().ContinueWithOnMainThread(task => {
FirebaseAnalytics.SetAnalyticsCollectionEnabled(true);
});
1.6 switched to Android environment and built with result "SUCCESSFUL" - with no errors whatsoever.
2. The issue -
2.1 I logged into my project on firebase and ran the code (from pc on Unity) and on my Android device, but firebase doesn't show any users connected :( (waiting for analytics).
2.2 Firebase
What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

The app actually works! It just doesn't show connected users.
I went straight ahead and started logging data to the Real Time Data Base and it worked - data was added but it keeps saying "0 User Connections".
Is that a bug?

Answer 2

The first thing to do is double check that the task completed successfully. You can do this by saying:
FirebaseApp.CheckAndFixDependenciesAsync().ContinueWithOnMainThread(task => {
if (task.Exception != null) {
Debug.LogError($"Task failed with {task.Exception}");
}
else if (task.Result != DependencyStatus.Available) {
Debug.LogError($"Firebase dependencies not available with {task.Result}");
}
else {
Debug.Log("Everything's good!");
FirebaseAnalytics.SetAnalyticsCollectionEnabled(true);
}
});
You'll want some way to listen to these messages on device, and you can sometimes get the Unity Console to track those. But these days I like to install the Android Logcat plugin. You can find it in the Package Manager built into Unity:
It'll give you this cool window under Window/Analysis/Android Logcat:
And usually automatically hooks up to any game I run with the "Build & Run" button in Unity.
This will give you a ton of useful information about your game and perhaps shed a little more light on what's going on if you either hadn't been seeing the Unity logs or had been running adb logcat from the command line.
If you don't see any helpful logs there, there's a button in that logcat window called "Open Terminal". The claim is that it will open a terminal with adb in the $PATH so you can run android commands (in my own testing, the window appeared behind Unity, so I didn't think it was working. Then using which adb it still showed my system install of adb.).
With this open, follow the instructions for debugging analytics on Android. You'll want to type adb shell setprop debug.firebase.analytics.app <package_name> where <package_name> would be whatever your game's package name is (in my screenshot above, it's com.Firebase.PopsiclePlatformer).
Then you can open "Debug View" in the Firebase Console and see events in near real time:
I didn't include these steps in my video because it was difficult to embed both iOS and Android instructions in a timely manner, it should typically just work although Analytics doesn't guarantee realtime event reporting, and the focus wasn't on Analytics. I'm looking at making an updated thing just for Analytics, so I'm really curious if all of this helps you!
There are a couple of other things to check:
You might want to make sure you hooked up Google Analytics (this wasn't a thing when I recorded my video), but I don't think you could get the linked screenshot if you did.
You may also have to run "Force Resolve" from the External Dependency Manager, but that will be much more obvious if you have good logging going:
--Patrick