Having an app is highly important for any business to thrive. Now more people prefer to do things online with convenience. To meet the demand in the rapidly evolving software development ecosystem, developers constantly search for better, faster, and more reliable options for web and mobile app development.
Firebase is the perfect choice when it comes to creating an app all from scratch. If you need a fully configured backend then it comes in handy. You just need to connect your app to Firebase for accessing backend services on the go with little configuration.
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👇In the article, you will find the answer to the following questions.
What is Firebase and which features does it offer?
What are the advantages and limitations of using Firebase in your application?
When should you use Firebase as a backend for your application?
Is there any alternative to Firebase?
What is Firebase and what are its best features?
Firebase was first founded as an independent company in 2011 and it was launched publicly in April 2012. Firebase is the cloud-hosted software development platform powered by Google. It helps you to quickly build web and mobile applications without managing the core infrastructure.
It stores and sync data in real-time as JSON across all the clients in real-time and remains available when the app goes offline.
Let’s have a closer look at the top features and capabilities of the Google Firebase platform. Under the hood, it offers dozens of features including the following.
- Authentication
Firebase authentication offers different methods to authenticate email and password during sign-up and sign-in. It provides a comprehensive SDK tool including UI libraries to build a custom interface for app authentication.
- Cloud Firestore
It is a real-time database with a user-friendly admin dashboard. It uses a NoSQL database to store synchronized data. Cloud Firestore allows developers to access the same data across different devices. It is a flexible and extensible database for multiple platforms (web and mobile).
Also, it provides continuous integration with the other Firebase and Google Cloud platform products. The access from the Cloud Firestore is protected via Firebase authentication and Firestore security rules.
- Analytics
You have built a great app but how to guarantee the usefulness of your application? Google Analytics for Firebase is a great source that provides free and unlimited analysis of your app.
It offers in-app behavior analytics that helps you to understand your users, their app usage characteristics, and much more. It also offers attribution analytics that measures the effectiveness of the advertising and other campaigns.
Overall this analysis helps to improve the user experience by analyzing the quality of the app through user flow, activity, infographics, and other attributes.
- Dynamic Links
With the Dynamic links, Firebase ensures a custom user experience for your app across all the platforms. Dynamic links are like smart URLs that help to retarget existing users to any of your desired locations. They are free to use at any scale for user-to-user sharing.
It simplifies app installation, as opening the dynamic link prompts app installation if the application is not yet installed. So, people can install apps easily.
- Automatic Scaling
Firebase provides high performance and scalability. Whenever there is a change in the data, firebase calculates the minimum set of updates needed to create all your client synchronized. The API functions of firebase help to scale linearly according to the size of data. So that your app scales smoothly from hundreds of users to millions.
- Cloud Messaging
The Firebase cloud messaging feature allows you to send push messages to the app users as per their interest when something gets updated. It is always better to target users with the information that interests them instead of blasting irrelevant messages to every user.
- Firebase testing
Firebase Test Lab service provides virtual and physical device access to test your app in a real-time environment. The capability can be integrated into the testing environment like Android studio, and the browser testing tools.
Another testing tool by Google Firebase is Crashlytics, it’s a real-time crash reporting tool for quick and easy troubleshooting of your application. The generated crash reports are formed into structured and prioritized lists.
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What are the advantages and limitations of using Firebase in your application?
Every product and platform has some pros and cons, the same applies to the Google Firebase. Here we will discuss the advantages and limitations of the Firebase platform.
Advantages
- Advanced database capabilities for robust backend
Firebase provides you with a fully secure and managed solution that lets you access your app data easily via the Firebase console. Data updates and offline access makes the database usable for real-time applications and to keep data in synchronization.
- Quick start with a free account
As you start with the Firebase you are not required to make any payment for its services. It allows you to start free with its basic services. However, when you reach a particular amount of memory or want to use its premium features you can easily choose from the paid plans.
- Wide ranges of services for faster app development
Firebase offers a set of pre-requisite for backend development that speeds up the entire development cycle. It allows you to choose from two databases i.e real-time DB and Firestore that store data in the cloud. It simplifies building serverless applications using integrated Cloud Functions.
- Clear and concise documentation
The platform has well-written technical and API documentation and SDK references. So, anyone can find what they are looking for. Moreover, the Firebase Youtube channel constantly posts new videos of their products to keep you up with the resources.
- Static hosting
Firebase hosting service comes with the integrated (CDN). That guarantees faster content delivery across the globe.
- Easy to set up
Firebase is great for quick projects, it is easy to set up, and eliminates complex configuration(for authentication, web sockets, and database connection) and only frontend logic.
- Community
Firebase has a strong community on GitHub, so you can find answers to any of your queries both on the official and other platforms. Till now more than 3 million apps are created using Google’s Firebase.
Limitations
- Limited querying capabilities
Firebase is a cloud-based NoSQL database that uses JSON file format. The sorting can be done by keys and data can be filtered by using equality or using ranges. Having a database as a single file doesn’t allow you to create a relationship between different data files. So, you cannot query for more than one key at a time.
That means, if you want to query using multiple keys it will not work, but it is pretty good as Firebase is a real-time database designed for speed.
- Limits data migration
As your product grows, you can face more issues with data migration. Firebase uses JSON documents that have no SQL features and the data is stored in key-value pairs. That makes it more challenging to migrate data in the firebase than data migration in the relational DB.
- Android centered and less support for iOS
Firebase still focuses more on Android devices. Android is sponsored by Google and it has built-in support for Android. Firebase Test Lab can be easily integrated with the Android studio. However, in the case of iOS, the features in Firebase don’t go so smoothly.
So, what do you think, should you use Firebase as a backend for your application?
Firebase has more pros than cons, it offers multiple tech features, clear documentation, and cross-platform SDKs to help you build and ship apps on Android, iOS, web, and Unity.
The best thing about Flutter is that it lets you start app development from the scratch with the minimum effort and resources. You can start using Firebase features with the implemented REST APIs for free. Still, you can replace the custom backend depending on the product development stage and the final goal.
You can blindly use Firebase unless your app is highly data-intensive and can go beyond the Firebase data caps. Overall, Firebase is advantageous in all sorts, you can get your app cheaply and quickly with less effort.
Is there any alternative to Firebase that uses SQL database?
If your app demands a relational database, for example in the case you want to keep transactions secure, Supabase is the best alternative to Firebase. Though currently, it is not fair to map Supabase with Firebase, they seem to be very quick to add new features to match what Firebase offers.
Supabase offers real-time data, authentication for multiple services, file storage, and more. But as compared to Firebase which offers unlimited projects, Supabse allows only three free projects.
If we compare Supabase vs Firebase, Supabase is the SQL database that utilized Postgres and Firebase uses a NoSQL document data store. If you really need a relational database in your backend, Supabase is the best.
Now, you have answers to your common questions.
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