Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

(firebase founder here) I’m thrilled to finally be able to show everyone what we’ve been working on over the last 18 months! When I said “big things are coming” in the HN comments back when our acquisition was announced, I was talking about today : )<p>We’re really excited about these new products. There are some big advances on the development side, with a new storage solution, integrated push messaging, remote configuration, updates to auth, etc. Perhaps more important though are the new solutions for later in your app’s lifecycle. We’ve added analytics, crash reporting, dynamic linking, and a bunch more so that we can continue to support you after you’ve built and launched your app too.<p>I&#x27;d suggest reading the blog post for more info: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firebase.googleblog.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;firebase-expands-to-become-unified-app-platform.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firebase.googleblog.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;firebase-expands-to-...</a><p>This is the first cut of a lot of new features, and we’re eager to hear what the Hacker News community thinks. I look forward to your comments!

Firebase is an incredibly powerful tool, and in a sense is a &quot;democratizing force&quot; in web development. Now anyone can build a complete web application without needing to know anything about setting up servers, content delivery networks, AWS (which is still quite difficult to use), and scaling. I teach kids as young as 10 years old to build iOS apps and websites with Firebase - they can develop locally and push to Firebase hosting with a single command. After exploring this new update, I can say with confidence that <i>literally everything</i> is easy-to-use now.<p>Whenever there is a Firebase announcement there are many replies along the lines of &quot;this won&#x27;t work for me because it&#x27;s owned by Google, may be discontinued, doesn&#x27;t have on-premise solution, etc&quot;. If these are your thoughts then you are missing the point of Firebase. It enables small web development shops like mine to focus on building beautiful web applications without having to give up manpower toward backend engineering. The cost of using Firebase is peanuts compared to the savings in employee hours.<p>Perhaps some day we will have to migrate elsewhere, but I find that possibility extremely unlikely because the clear amount of effort it took to create the Google-y version means this is a long-term play.

We were part of the Early Access Program for the expanded Firebase and used it to build our music collaboration app Kwaver. With the new features, they did a nice job of collecting a bunch of related mobile products (Analytics, Push Notifications, Storage, Authentication, Database, Deep Linking, etc) into a pretty cohesive platform, and it&#x27;s saved us a bunch of time.<p>With Firebase Analytics we can track events, segment audiences (according to user properties; active, dormant, inactive) and take action according to the user segment. We are able to send push notifications (also using Firebase) to dormant male users who play the piano for example. Another cool feature is Remote Config, which gives you the option to ship a number of separate experiences and track the user interaction. Like A&#x2F;B Testing but way more flexible.<p>For us, the best product is the existing database product they had, as it really improves our user experience to ditch the &#x27;pull to refresh&#x27; button&#x27; and have our app respond to changes live.<p>We have been waiting for Google to provide developers a more complete mobile solution for a while now, and they’ve done it superbly through Firebase!<p>Feedback; It would be really cool if Firebase could implement UTM codes to be able to track user acquisition and be able to automate actions according to User Properties.<p>Shameless plug: if you&#x27;re a musician (or a music fan), we&#x27;d really appreciate if you could download our music collaboration app, try it out and give us feedback. It’s available for free on the app store; The following link will re-direct you there later today. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kwaver.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kwaver.com</a>

I love Firebase, but the Swift code in the iOS guide is of really low quality. For example (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firebase.google.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;database&#x2F;ios&#x2F;save-data#delete_data" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firebase.google.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;database&#x2F;ios&#x2F;save-data#dele...</a>):<p><pre><code> if currentData.value != nil, let uid = FIRAuth.auth()?.currentUser?.uid { var post = currentData.value as! [String : AnyObject] var stars : Dictionary&lt;String, Bool&gt; stars = post[&quot;stars&quot;] as? Dictionary&lt;String, Bool&gt; ?? [:] &#x2F;&#x2F; ... } </code></pre> What this should really be:<p><pre><code> guard let post = currentData.value as? [String : AnyObject], uid = FIRAuth.auth()?.currentUser?.uid else { return FIRTransactionResult.successWithValue(currentData) } let stars = post[&quot;stars&quot;] as? [String : Bool] ?? [:] &#x2F;&#x2F; ... }</code></pre>

Interesting that Google is doubling down where Facebook divested. The obvious difference is that Google has a cloud platform and Firebase is a funnel into it, whereas Facebook had nothing to funnel Parse users into.<p>I wonder if Facebook will ever launch a cloud platform. They&#x27;ve got the computing resources for it.

We&#x27;ve been using the Firebase platform for a while now. It&#x27;s pretty cool to see them expand from 3 products to ~15 overnight. I&#x27;m most excited about their analytics and crash reporting. I must say that their system has been one of the best we have used in a longtime, I am really excited to see other aspects like analytics and ads being housed under this same umbrella, as I think it is going to help with development time overall. One area that I&#x27;d like to see improved though is a deeper querying language for database, or even better would be a way to automatically export the system in realtime to a postgres database for better SQL type analytics.

The concern I&#x27;ve always had with Firebase is the lack of a business logic layer between clients and the database. This tends to force the business logic into the clients themselves.<p>Trying to change the schema if you have Firebase clients deployed that can&#x27;t be instantly upgraded via a browser refresh (i.e. iOS and Android mobile apps) seems an extremely challenging task.

We used the original Firebase database product to build <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;socrates.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;socrates.io&#x2F;</a> 3.5 years ago, and I remember getting Socrates running in a few hours. I’m looking forward to seeing them up the bar on speed of development &#x2F; ease for their next 10 products :) Nice work team!

way too risky to use it for startups. Google may discontinue this project at any time and you have to spend months to rewrite everything for another database. IF google open source it and we will be able to install it on premise and patch without Google, that would be ok. So, I would recommend to use PostgreSQL instead.

When will it support a count query? now to be able to count number of children I have to download all the data. Count is such an important feature for me.

I have build apps with firebase in the past and the feature I missed the most was performing scheduled tasks on the database. Now we are getting this BIG app platform update and this feature is still not in there. AWS Lambda with Scheduled Events for a long time to come :sad-panda:

I remember walking into Firebase&#x27;s offices about 4 years ago when it was 4 people on Townsend St in SOMA in a 300 square foot share office space. It&#x27;s amazing to see how far they&#x27;ve come; Congrats to the whole team.

Even if you don&#x27;t want to use any Firebase service you might still want to use it only for Analytics. Drop the firebase SDK in the App and you are done. Free, unlimited and unsampled Analytics reports for your App.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firebase.google.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;analytics&#x2F;#implementation_path" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firebase.google.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;analytics&#x2F;#implementation_p...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;firebase&#x2F;answer&#x2F;6317517?hl=en&amp;ref_topic=6317489" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;firebase&#x2F;answer&#x2F;6317517?hl=en&amp;ref...</a>

As a current Firebase customer, I&#x27;m pretty thrilled about all this (especially since I was afraid Google would pull a Facebook here). However, there&#x27;s quite a bunch of API changes and absolutely no info about how long the old JS library, endpoints, etc etc are to keep working. Should I get stressed out?

This may be a stupid question, but: What do you use it for? Cannot everyone basically edit the client code and do whatever with your data? I&#x27;ve only used Firebase for prototyping.

The thought of reliable, managed hosting is interesting.<p>But how does one extend an app outside storing and fetching data? What if you want to run a background job to send emails, parse a complex csv or create a custom pdf and write to firebase storage?

I&#x27;m in talks with a company regarding building an application for users in developing countries, where Android 2.0 is still the dominant OS version.<p>Firebase 2.0 looks like a great fit for their needs otherwise, but is the new sdk backward compatible to Android 2.0?

So how would one address server side logic?<p>Like for example doing something with the data before sending it to the client?

I think services like firebase are a very scary thing. Too much dependence on one vendor, too much black box magic, too much logic that is beyond control. And services like this contribute to general dumbing down of software developers. We&#x27;re heading towards world of script kiddies where html and js rule and all complex logic is handled and controlled by service providers. Is it a good thing? You can deliver fast, but in the long term is it worth it?

From my experience with the new API, it&#x27;s a little less intuitive and worse documentation. I think it&#x27;s rad that Google invested a ton of resources into firebase.<p>we have been super successful with firebase, and are proponents of using it as a notification system and less of a datastore. That would be easy, but unwise. Use it to notify clients of changes so they can fetch data. Read from Firebase, write to your own server&#x2F;DB.

I don&#x27;t think it was explicitly mentioned in the keynote, but it looks like they updated pricing:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firebase.google.com&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firebase.google.com&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;</a><p>Can&#x27;t find the old pricing now, but it seems similar, but with less plan types.

It looks like it is here to stay... But that surprise Parse shutdown will leave me asking, what if...

As a server engineer already having trouble finding a new job, how worried should I be about this?

This appears to just be a way to limit the growth of third party tracking which threaten Google by encouraging user acquisition from many sources.<p>I say this because they dont specifically say they will postback events to advertising networks other than Google&#x27;s.

For Firebase&#x2F;Google Cloud Platform engineer: does it mean Google Cloud Endpoints is being phased out? if i&#x27;m already using Google Cloud Endpoints, should i move to Firebase? what&#x27;s the advantage?

I&#x27;ve had only good experiences with firebase. They added an HTTP api, web hosting, multiple security rule preprocessors (pain point), and got faster and cheaper. Yeah only good things.

The biggest problem with any Google cloud services nowadays is you don&#x27;t know if it was&#x2F;will blocked in China, of course it is okay if you don&#x27;t care the users in China.

I intend to use Firebase as at least a temporary backend while developing my app. Maybe I&#x27;ll move to a real server later, but during development it&#x27;s really easy to just have some place you can shoot json at. And I can always add interaction later by having some other application listen to it.<p>I don&#x27;t really need the actual realtime communication stuff all that much (though it might turn out to be useful), but just a lightweight place to store json is really useful.

Not expressly mentioned anywhere that I&#x27;ve seen: the Free plan now includes custom domains + SSL cert. Under the previous firebase.com, that was $5 a month.<p>Sounds good to me!

Is there a tutorial that explains how to setup a backend for user-taken videos? for an IOS app<p>one thing I liked about Parse was that it&#x27;s documentation was newbie-friendly.

Can somebody explain the new Firebase reframing towards GCP? Maybe with another provider analogy? (e.g.,Firebase is to GCP like Parse is(was) to Facebook)

Question: Would Firebase be a good option where the desktop&#x2F;web app is the main access point, mobile been secondary (around 3:1) ?

FYI, new docs on data structure mention rooms, which was an example in the old docs. Should read messages or conversations: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firebase.google.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;database&#x2F;web&#x2F;structure-data#flatten_data_structures" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firebase.google.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;database&#x2F;web&#x2F;structure-data...</a>

I&#x27;m building a simple web app where I want signed in users to be able to add a JSON object to a database and then list all JSON objects publicly. Only the user who created the object should be able to edit it. Is this a good use-case for Firebase or should I look into something else?

Feel like the new Wordpress&#x2F;Drupal&#x2F;CMS, just in App space.

What is the state of AngularFire library, there are no guides for angular in the new documentation? And when will the angularfire for angular2 be ready to use?

Is user email confirmation finally supported by Firebase? Last time I checked it wasn&#x27;t.

&quot;... and earn more money.&quot; Is this really necessary on the homepage? Sounds like a old misleading spam page

for all of you looking for a real-time api platform that&#x27;s open source and not owned by a cloud giant come join us build telepat.io

So, Still no offline persistence for JS. What a huge disappointment.

Provide a self hosting option or GTFO.