> 2-3 years ago when they force-migrated everyone to firebase analytics
No, this is the same migration. This is my point: you weren't actually forced to migrate until now. The migration has been optional up until this announcement, and many people haven't. What your team did 2-3 years ago, the majority of organizations have been putting off. But now they can't anymore.
Wow, is that right. We had some weird little projects that were web based that we didn't do anything with that we could still view through analytics.google but I felt that the mobile stuff was GOOOONE unless we did something.
So they've basically said 'GA is closing unless you want to pay 120k/pa so move to firebase - GA is now Firebase Analytics' to now 'Firebase Analytics is Google Analytics again, but that thing we said you had to do you now have to definitively do?' ?
100% - I jumped right on it when they said that, did a few hours of hurried research, then discovered that it wasn't actually possible to use Firebase for what we use GA for. Figured we just had to wait until they hit feature parity so I've been checking the status of things a few times a year ever since.
...and there's been very little movement. We can still create "universal analytics" properties, we still can't do the same stuff in Firebase, and the GA4 "Measurement Protocol" is still in beta.
I think our eventual move is going to be to a non-Google product.
You’re right, there was so much feature asymmetry we couldn’t justify sticking around - we would have lost any valuable insights into user behaviour. Firebase analytics just seemed like a ‘made for ads and influencers’ analytics tool. What a monumental cockup by the team that decided that it was important to lose that pool of users. Because of that shift we actively avoided making any choices re any of the other Google cloud or firebase tools.
There’s heaps of good ones around now - our shift to amplitude was a good one but I know there are a lot of other really simple and free ones about too
It sounds like you were working on app tracking rather than web tracking, so your timeline makes more sense. The various GA SDKs for different platforms stopped working a few years ago, forcing a move to firebase-which-is-now-GA.
On the website side of things, which is GA's core user-base, Universal Analytics has remained supported up til this announcement.
No, this is the same migration. This is my point: you weren't actually forced to migrate until now. The migration has been optional up until this announcement, and many people haven't. What your team did 2-3 years ago, the majority of organizations have been putting off. But now they can't anymore.