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We are in the process of merging 2 separate applications(Android & iOS) into one. Each of the application has its own Firebase project, and its own Google Analytics 4 property. So essentially we have two different setups and we have to choose which one to go with. We would like to keep the Firebase project of the 1st app, but use the GA4 property that is connected to the Firebase project of the 2nd app.

The main question: Does changing the Firebase project change the IDs that are getting passed to GA4 and are used for analytical tracking/data stitching? Would this break the data continuity for users of the second app(the GA4 property we want to keep)?

We are worried that even if we keep the same property, to keep the data about the users of the App 1, we will lose the data continuity and every user will count as new - thus influencing the GA4 data itself but also the Ad systems that the GA4 is connected to.

Happy to provide additional details if needed. Thanks very much for the responses :)

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Does changing the Firebase project change the IDs that are getting passed to GA4 and are used for analytical tracking/data stitching?

Yes. The measurementID for Google Analytics (which identifies the GA4 property) is embedded into the GoogleService-Info.plist (for iOS) and google-services.json (for Android) that you get for your Firebase project, so changing the Firebase and downloading new configuration files will also change the GA4 property that analytics are reported to.

If I recall correctly you can use Google Tag Manager to get the information from the two data streams into a single GA view. An alternative would be to configure export of the analytics data to BigQuery, where you have full control over its merging and display.

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Thanks for the answer. That's why we would like to reconnect the old GA4 property to different Firebase project. We would generate the Firebase config files after we connect the GA4, that we want to use for that single merged application. So the measurement ID should stay the same. Only thing that changes would be the Firebase project itself. Maybe I should phrase the question as: does connecting the GA4 with new Firebase project, and thus new Google Cloud Project, change the ID's of the users, that way the GA4 and Google Ads that are using the GA4's data lose the data continuity?
"Thanks for the answer." -> There's a button on the left of the answer that allows you to upvote it.
As far as I know, the config files I mentioned will contain the ID of the property that is auto-created for that project by Firebase. Then again, you can just open the generated file to verify what value is in there - and for most values you can change them to fit your needs before feeding the file to the iOS/Android build process.
Yes, we want to change the measurement ID in the config files (by connecting the property, before we generate the config file). The question is whether it will affect the data that is flowing into the GA4. We are concerned that changing the Firebase projects and thus Google Cloud project database will cause ID's that GA4 uses for user tracking/stitching to be changed and counting every user as a "new user", and thus breaking the continuity for ad system optimization algorithms.

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