Firebase is a cloud services provider and backend as a service company based in San Francisco, California. The company makes a number of products for software developers building mobile or web applications. Firebase was founded in 2011 by Andrew Lee and James Tamplin and launched with a realtime cloud database in April 2012. Firebase’s primary product is a realtime database which provides an API that allows developers to store and sync data across multiple clients. The company was acquired by Google in October 2014.

Google offers a plethora of cloud services that mobile developers can use to power their apps. With Firebase, which it acquired in 2014, it already offered developers a dedicated platform and SDK for building mobile apps; today it is greatly expanding this service by launching a number of new features and integrating the service deeper into the rest of its cloud tools.

The new Firebase, which the company announced at its I/O developer conference today, takes the service’s existing features and expands upon them. In its previous incarnation, Firebase was somewhat similar to Facebook’s now-defunct Parse in that it offered a database service, user authentication features and hosting tools. In this new version, Firebase takes many of Google’s existing developer tools, like Google Cloud Messaging, and combines them with new and existing Firebase services. With this update, Google is turning Firebase into a unified app platform for its now 470,000 developers on the service (up from 110,000 when it acquired Firebase).

Firebase now features a very deeply integrated analytics services, for example, which was built by the same team that is responsible for Google Analytics. All developers have to do to implement this is add a few lines of code to their apps. This will feed basic user information right from the app to Firebase, but just like with Google Analytics, developers can also instrument specific parts of their apps with fine-grained events in order to, for example, track whenever a button was pressed or a purchase was made.

Using this data, Firebase can then build audience segments and allow developers to analyze their users’ behavior in even more detail, and see how their advertising campaigns are performing.