Advantages of using Firebase for Mobile App Development

Introduction to Firebase for Mobile App

As mobile apps evolved from being simple entertainment platforms for people to more sophisticated and challenging tools for even enterprises, there was a huge need to improve its backend capabilities. By backend, we meant not just scalable storage, but also high-performance processing engines, flexible integration capabilities and much more.

Besides, today there is a huge demand for mobile apps to have analytical and artificial intelligence-based capabilities that require even more processing power in the backend. So how can app development companies or businesses that want to build a mobile app to serve customers achieve this level of power in their backend? Well, you do not have to look beyond Firebase for this.

Backed by Google, Firebase offers a suite of tools required for businesses to build powerful apps without having to worry about management of infrastructure. It is designed to support backend developers at all stages of development and helps in improving the quality of the overall app development exercise.

Why Firebase is used for mobile app development?

It provides a host of features and modules that an app developer needs, as a service thereby eliminating the need to create these from scratch.

It includes everything from a scalable database to powerful analytics libraries. Firebase is in no way a replacement for backend development activity, but it is rather a platform to help backend developers and engineers enhance the experience of the app without stressful coding and architectural planning.

Some interesting features of using firebase:-

Real-time Data
Security Built-in
Email and Password authentication
Static File Hosting
Storage fostered by Google Cloud

Now, here are 5 revolutionary advantages brought by Firebase in today’s mobile app development practices.

1) Faster time to market

This is one of the key elements that decides how successful a mobile app turns out to be. When consumers get to use your apps or its new features as early as possible, they turn out to be your biggest competitive advantage in extremely sensitive markets.

For example, imagine that you own a financial management application that consumers use to manage their personal financial expenses. When customers want to use their smartphones increasingly for making payments across their physical and digital shopping destinations, then it is imperative that you roll out the functionality in your app at the earliest or risk losing market share to competitors who do it first.

A typical back end development exercise for this capability would take months or even years to be production ready. Bring in Firebase, and you could be looking at launching the feature in a matter of weeks thanks to the huge set of processing capabilities and scalable assets it offers. Firebase offers this competitive advantage that you cannot simply ignore.

2) Reduces development time and effort

For building a backend for your mobile app, there is a requirement for servers, hosting, database, and numerous supporting backend services. You need dedicated development professionals for managing this backend activity as well as another team to work on the front-end mobile app code.

This leads to increased development efforts, integration time and project management overhead. And above all, dependencies in these two teams will push development timelines further if one team gets held up with some challenges they face.

Communication and collaboration efforts are also high in such mode of application development which ultimately increases the risk of errors that can lead to severe consequences on the final product.

Firebase comes preloaded with all such pre-requisites of backend development so that you need not re-invent the wheel for each activity. This is a huge advantage of using firebase for mobile app as a front-end developer who needs a certain backend data type or service can simply integrate his code with the Firebase suite and get the desired input.

He or his team can manage the end-to-end development for the mobile app thereby reducing overheads and dependency-based challenges to a bare minimum or even eliminate it all together for smaller projects.

This leads to a drastic reduction of time and effort needed in building mobile apps which is a boon to companies who have smaller development teams.

3) Real-Time Database Scalability

Cloud Firestore is the popular database platform within the Firebase suite of offerings. It allows development teams to quickly setup a highly scalable and flexible real time database for their mobile, web and server development activities.

Elimination of a middle synchronization layer between the application and the backend database results in direct data access through the Firebase SDK.

It ensures that data is well synchronized within the application environment irrespective of the internet connectivity it has.

It is a NoSQL database which has been proven to be more effective than relational databases for mobile application-based workloads. It can be used to store large amounts of unstructured or structured data, run powerful processing algorithms and scale on demand to support heavy spikes in data.

It allows easy storage and management of user-generated content irrespective of the volume of data that is generated. Google’s cloud storage empowers easy scalability for the data storage as well as processing systems to accommodate large volumes seamlessly.

4) Google Analytics Integration

Any kind of personalized experience that you need to provide for your mobile app consumers require insights about their behavior and usage patterns. From a traditional standpoint, you need to either build an analytical engine into your mobile apps backend to process these insights or you may need to integrate powerful 3rd party analytical solutions to get the job done.

With Firebase, you have Google’s own Google Analytics integrated into the core solution and available for you to use to create your own views about customers based on target data behavior. You can easily monitor user behavior, identify journeys across devices and do much more personalization in your mobile apps with the help of in-built Google Analytics.

It provides you data on where your app scores in terms of user engagement. This allows you to build features and capabilities that customers would want from your app and hence improve brand loyalty and customer satisfaction. It helps in placing the right content for the right audience at the right time to ensure that all your customer needs are well addressed from your mobile app.

Ultimately, analytics serves as a game-changing feature and highly advantageous in your mobile app’s journey to building a sustainable growth channel for your business powered by user feedback and interests.

5) Flexible Cost

Firebase is free to begin with and there are many subscription-based plans for various services within Firebase. Enterprises or startups that want to begin their mobile app journey can use Firebase to explore possibilities in small scales and later expand their capabilities on a pay-as-you-go basis.

This provides enough financial flexibility for small businesses to compete with established businesses in the race for building innovative mobile based business channels. From e-commerce to mobile payments, there is huge ocean of opportunities that they can explore within their limited financial capabilities and technology constraints.

The lower starting cost and on-demand pricing allows companies to monetize their mobile channels gradually and maintain low operational costs throughout its lifecycle.

Final Thoughts:-

Due to these tremendous advantages of using Firebase in Mobile apps, it has revolutionized the way mobile app backends are built today. From cost to effort, there is a huge impact it made in making app backend development more accessible and seamless for businesses of all sizes.

All that a business needs to create a productive and sustainable roadmap for their mobile app journey is a knowledgeable workforce who can use tools like Firebase to create amazing mobile app experiences for your consumers. We understand the need for you to focus on core business activities and the limit it creates for your resources.

This is why CitrusBug offers state of the art Firebase development services for mobile app development projects. Our consultants will identify the most profitable growth roadmap for your mobile app, build capabilities with using Firebase for your backend and create solid front-end mobile apps for your customers to use as well. Get in touch with us today to know more.