• April 30, 2023

Google’s Firebase Mobile and Web App Development Tool

In this fast changing world, the challenge of developing a high quality and robust mobile app would require a lot of commitment and dedication. There is such a platform from the Google stable that has caught the eye of developers and is now among the top tools they use. That’s Firebase, which has numerous options for building highly functional and flexible web apps, Android and iOS platforms. While it definitely has its own set of competitors in this industry, Firebase is always in conversation with the best platforms currently available.

Firebase has powerful features for developing, managing, and enhancing apps. With its own set of trusted tools, apps can be built and expanded on demand. Therefore, their goal is to solve three main dilemmas for developers: build an app quickly, launch and monitor it with confidence, and engage your users. Access to services that developers can build themselves allows them to focus on delivering robust app experiences. Some of its prominent features include databases, authentications, push messages, analytics, file storage, and much more. Developers can scale on demand without any problem.

The history of this platform has its own ups and downs like many others. It originated from Envolve, a start-up company established in 2011 by Andrew Lee and James Tamplin. They provided an API for developers to make it easy to integrate online chat for websites, but soon discovered that their chat service was being used to broadcast non-chat messages. They trusted the platform for real-time application data synchronization, so they decided to differentiate the real-time architecture from the chat system that led to the founding of Firebase in 2011, leading to the public launch in April 2012.

Firebase Realtime Database was first released as an API for synchronizing application data across Android, web, and iOS devices that developers can use to build collaborative applications in real time.

Firebase received seed funding of approximately $1 million in 2012 from contributors including Greylock Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Flybridge Capital Partners, and Founder Collective, and also raised Series A funding of approximately $6 million in 2013.

The launch of Firebase Authentication and Firebase Hosting in 2014 established the company as a leading mobile backend as a service (MbaaS).

It was acquired by Google in October 2014 and is now the Google BaaS platform. It eventually merged with DivShot, a web hosting platform also acquired by the tech giant. Since then, he has amassed an impressive sample of clients, including Alibaba, The New York Times, Todoist, Le Figaro, and eBay Motors.

The platform is accessible for free with your own limitations, which is your Spark Plan. It allows users to sign in with their Google account, which made it so popular. This includes 10 GB hosting, SSL, multiple websites, custom domain, and various other features. It also has optional features like Firebase ML, Realtime Database, Cloud Firestore, and Test Lab, but no access to Cloud Functions.

On the other hand, developers who require more services can upgrade to the Blaze Plan which has the original free limits. So if you host 20 GB of storage, you will only be charged for the additional 10 GB usage. This plan has a flexible pricing model of $0.026/GB. Includes all Spark Plan features, a plan calculator, and a Usage tab to check plan payment status and data related to usage of different Firebase services, such as the total amount of data within a database , the total number of real-time connections, including WebSockets. , and more.

Still, whichever plan you choose, Firebase has a generous array of always-free services that give it an edge over its competitors. We will talk about each one concisely.

The first is the application distribution feature that allows users to receive useful feedback prior to the production phase of a new version and to submit older versions of applications via CI servers or a console. Another is app indexing which allows users to re-engage Google Search users by providing app links in Search. A/B testing is also a feature that allows users to quickly test changes made to UIs, features, and campaigns before the app is released. Predictions uses machine learning data to develop dynamic user segments based on behaviors. The in-app messaging feature engages active users of the app using contextual messages. Firebase Cloud Messaging allows app owners to notify client apps if data or email will be synced with payload transfers up to 4KB for IM scenarios.

To get more information about the performance of your web applications on different operating systems, the performance monitoring feature is provided. Crashlytics finds and fixes problems quickly by monitoring both fatal and non-fatal errors, and reports are generated based on how they affect the user experience. Dynamic links are smart URLs that allow app administrators to direct current and potential users to different parts of an Android or iOS app. The Remote Config cloud solution allows users to modify the behavior and appearance of applications without updating them. Machine Learning components can be used by iOS and Android developers, providing predictions to notify returning app users.

Another notable feature of this platform is its ability to radically reduce the time to market for application development, as front-end developers can manage all the work, reduce the time it takes to complete it, avoid creating repetitive code, and start a backend from scratch. . This is all thanks to the services mentioned above, such as data storage, authentication, notifications, analytics, and more.

Therefore, with the platform shifting focus towards creating front-end code for mobile apps that provides convenience and helps keep costs down, many developers around the world are turning to Firebase. Integrating this platform into your code base is made easier by high-quality SDKs and detailed documentation.

Serverless application development via built-in Cloud Functions can be used with the Blaze Plan via both database options: Cloud Firestore and Firebase Realtime Database. Cloud Firestore or Google Firestore is a cloud-based NoSQL database for storage and synchronization. It can be accessed from mobile or web applications through native SDKs. Firebase Realtime Database is a cloud-hosted database that provides JSON-based data storage and can perform real-time data synchronization with connected clients and allows applications to receive the latest updates.

With those advantages, you can’t see a lot of disadvantages in using the platform. The biggest limitation of this platform that makes it an unsuitable choice for developers is that it is not open source, so you cannot modify the Firebase source code, which prevents the community from extending the product. Another is the use of the NoSQL framework for a database that makes it difficult to execute complex queries. The absence of dedicated servers is another major limitation, as it offers less versatility compared to a full cluster structure and can prevent optimal performance. Its usage-based pricing model also poses a problem in cost forecasting, especially when scalability requirements cannot be predicted. Support for ACID properties has also been emphasized in the community, because although it can support this type of transaction, developers need to run their own code, unlike a traditional database which results in a more complicated system.

Since Firebase is part of the Google Cloud Platform, it works seamlessly with its other services and integrates with many third-party services, but there are no options to run on other cloud providers like AWS or Azure. As a Google subdomain, it is blocked in many countries like China because they banned URIs with *.google.com and *.googleapis.com.

Nonetheless, Firebase is still a great platform, even if it does come with its own set of limitations, and as with other industries, there are plenty of alternatives out there that are just as awesome.

Back4App is a widely used open source platform that works as a low-code backend to speed up application development. A reliable option for hosting web, mobile and IoT applications that allows developers to take advantage of a database that enables fast and efficient data synchronization and updating. Backendless is a popular mobile backend that provides users with the options of dedicated, cloud, and managed servers to suit different development requirements. AWS Amplify is feature-rich for AWS full-stack application development and comes with its analytics deemed suitable for uncovering user behaviors with convenient metrics and automatic tracking. Another is Parse, which is a prominent open source back-end framework since 2016 and provides a rich set of features like spreadsheet-like database, APIs, notifications, authentication, and storage. While Kinvey is a serverless application development platform for multi-channel application development, and it operates through a cloud backend and SDK. It has shared code for cross-platform applications and can facilitate easy code management.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *