Firebase - is user deleted from Audience if his User property is changed

Question

We have two Audiences based on the User Property which value is either true or false.

And we send different Push Notifications to these 2 Audiences.

At one point user's property value can be changed so I expect him to be deleted from one Audience and appear in another like it is described official docs:

Using Remote Config with Analytics audiences has some limitations when audiences are not based on user properties. Specifically, users become permanent members of an audience after they are assigned to it. With user properties, you can define them so that they are only temporarily true: users are assigned to an audience when the properties are true, and then removed from the audience when the properties are no longer true.

But in reality user stays in both Audiences and I receive both push notifications(dedicated to different Audiences) on the same device.

And same issue is experienced by others: Create audience based on dynamic user property

Is it a bug or am I missing/misunderstanding something?

Sashasashay

Answer 1

Once a user is added to an analytics audience, they will forever be a part of that audience.

The documentation you quote from provides a link to the documentation for using Firebase Remote Config with Analytics. Specifically:

Remote Config now lets you use Analytics user properties to create conditions, allowing you to customize your app for segments of your user base that you defined much more precisely than was previously possible.

So by using user properties from Analytics in Remote Config, you can have them temporarily meet a specific condition in Remote Config. Once the property changes to a non-matching value, the user will no longer match the Remote Config condition.

This only works within Remote Config. The user will still be part of any Analytics audience they may have become part of earlier. Hence, any targeting that you do based on the Analytics audience will still target the user.

Testify

Thank you for the quick response and a great answer! Could you please confirm that if we use User Properties instead of Audiences in our case then we will avoid the user receiving both notifications, meaning it is not possible for user to have 2 different values for the same User Property at the same time? – Sashasashay

If it is a single property with two values, the user can only have one of those values at a time. So each time the condition in Remote Config gets evaluated they could only meet the criteria for one. If you're having trouble setting that up in Remote Config, post back with details of your setup and I'll have a look (or ask someone with more expertise in that area). – Testify

This is actually not about Remote Config but about Cloud Messaging where we target users by Audiences. Anyway I think you’ve already answered my question, we will use User Properties instead. Thanks a lot. – Sashasashay

Answer 2

With recent Firebase updates this should be true by default as explained here ("Reach users more effectively with dynamic audiences in Google Analytics" chapter): https://firebase.googleblog.com/2018/10/whats-new-at-firebase-summit-2018.html

Note that you can still have the old behaviour (forever in the audience) if you checked "At any point" in your conditions as explained here: https://support.google.com/firebase/answer/6317509?hl=en (Step 6)

Galloping