FR: Allow Performance Monitoring to be used in iOS App Extensions

[inPhilly]

[READ] Guidelines

When filing a feature request please make sure the issue title starts with "FR:".

A good feature request ideally

• is either immediately obvious (i.e. "Add Sign in with Apple support"), or
• starts with a use case that is not achievable with the existing Firebase API and
  includes an API proposal that would make the use case possible. The proposed API
  change does not need to be very specific.

Once you've read this section, please delete it and fill out the rest of the template.

Feature proposal

• Firebase Component: Performance Monitoring

Describe your use case and/or feature request here.

I have an iOS app with an Action Extension that could benefit from Performance Monitoring. It might look a little different than it does for regular apps, but I believe that this would be beneficial to many iOS developers.

[ryanwilson]

Hi @inPhilly - thanks for the request.

Quick question: Have you tried to include Performance Monitoring in the extension and failed? If so, please let us know what went wrong and what steps you used to get set up. That way we have a good idea of where to look if something is currently broken.

[fermoya]

Hi @ryanwilson , I'm having the same issue here. I wanted to see how long my WidgetExtension takes to reload the timeline, and log some custom values depending on the kind of content is fetched depending on some App environment values.

Adding it to the Podfile works fine but then there's an error when I try to use Performance:

[ryanwilson]

cc @visumickey - any idea what could be causing that error to appear?

[kgaidis]

+1 lots of my code/frameworks is shared across extensions, so right now it's difficult to use the performance SDK. Specifically, I am using new iOS 16 Screen Time API's which make heavy use of extensions, so much of my code runs through extensions.

one big pain-point is that AFAIK you can't do this (this is psuedocode):

#if NOT_EXTENSION 
 // track performance
#end 

ALL code referencing non-extension safe API (@available(iOSApplicationExtension, unavailable)) must be called from non-extensions. So this problem "bubbles up" to all code.

[visumickey]

Thanks for resurfacing the need for the support for extensions. This can definitely help up prioritize this in the upcoming quarter.

@kgaidis I have not tried this. But can you use the disable performance APIs to see if you can make performance not initialize and process in the extension world? Here are the reference to the firebase performance disable APIs.

In the meanwhile, rest assured, we will work on enabling this feature at the earliest. Thank you!

[kgaidis]

@visumickey

can you use the disable performance APIs to see if you can make performance not initialize and process in the extension world?

Is this is a question on whether I can still use performance API's outside of the extensions (in my app)? If it is, then yes, I can. The only blocker is having references to the performance SDK inside the extensions. I can still use the performance SDK from my app's target.

If that is not what you meant, then my apologies. LMK if there is something I can still help/answer if-needed.