Why Use Firebase ?

Firebase is a platform provided by Google to develop Android and web applications. It provides a user-friendly experience for building full stack applications. It also provides databases, authentications, storage for files, and many more such kinds of facilities. As stated earlier, it is a platform by Google, therefore it has good resources of documentation, providing flexibility to the developers to learn its function and modules very easily.

In this article, we are going to discover the uses of Firebase, its benefits, pros and cons, and many more such things. We will understand the uses of Firebase over its other alternatives.

• Firebase is a platform provided by Google to develop small to large-scale apps with authentications and storage.
• We can develop mobile and desktop applications with the help of the Firebase platform. It offers us a wide range of tools and extensions to develop high-quality applications with greater efficiency.
• Firebase consists of various features such as authentications, real-time database (NoSQL), cloud functions, hosting, storage and many more.

In this area, where most people are in the internet, google is the one thing that is common to most people. Firebase, being a platform provided by google possesses various flexibilities in terms of authentication, storage and security. In this, we will discuss the benefits of using firebase.

1. Easy to use User Authentications: Firebase provides great authentication services with some easy to use libraries to authenticate users, such as via (email and password) , pre-built UI, social sites ( such as Google, Yahoo, Github , Twitter and many more). It helps in user creating along with password management, verification and security control.
2. Provides a great Storage: Firebase storage is great solution to upload, download, create, and list files. It is designed to storage and access user generated files like images, videos, documents etc. By default, cloud storage bucket requires firebase authentications in order to perform tasks on the files.
3. Hosting: Firebase being a great platform provides us a hosting service known as Firebase hosting. Firebase hosting is a easy to use, fast, scalable and secure way to host our mobile and desktop applications. With some simple lines of codes, we can develop and serve our static or dynamic content to a global content delivery network (in short CDN).
4. Realtime Database: Firebase provides a NoSQL cloud based database which supports the real time data store and sync across various clients. Data is available to all the clients in real-time even if the apps goes offline. Data stored in the database is in JSON format.
5. Security: Firebase provides us the flexibility to simple or complex rules which will help in protecting our data stored in cloud database from malicious users.
6. Cloud Functions: Firebase cloud functions allows us to extend our applications functionalities with server-less functions. They are event driven, server-less and easy to integrate with other Firebase services. support asynchronous and background processing, are secure, have built-in monitoring and logging capabilities, and offer a cost-effective pay-as-you-go pricing model.
7. Analytics: Firebase Analytics is a powerful tool for tracking user behavior, app performance, and making informed decisions to enhance user experience. It offers event tracking, user attribute, audience segmentation, conversion tracking, retention analysis, performance monitoring, custom dashboards, and real-time reporting.

• Mobile Development: Firebase is supported by both Android and iOS. Firebase offers an iOS SDK and Android SDK for integrating firebase services into native iOS and Android applications respectively. Firebase is also supported in cross platform languages such as Flutter.
• Web Development: Firebase provides a JavaScript SDK that can be used with vanilla or various other JavaScript frameworks such as react, angular etc.
• Other: Some other languages such as C, Unity and C++ are also support firebase.

In this, we are going to do a deep dive into the pros and cons of using Firebase platform. We will briefly discuss all the points with a clear understanding.

Pros:

1. Firebase provides a server-less architecture that can help in writing the code without giving much attention to server management, scalability and server management.
2. Firebase provides us the easy to use software development kits (in short SDKs) for implementing secure user authentications through email and password or with some social logins ( such as google, github, yahoo and many more).
3. It provides us the provides us a brief ideas about user interaction to our application. This will eventually help us in improving and optimizing apps for better user experience.
4. It provides a cross platform support ( both iOS and Android). It also supports various JavaScript frameworks such as react, angular, vue.js.
5. It provides a NoSQL cloud based database which supports real-time data synchronization.

Cons:

1. Firebase offers a NoSQl cloud based database. Which means it cannot support relational database structures. Running complex database queries is still a big challenge to this platform.
2. Vendor lock-in: Vendor lock in is a situation in which cost of switching to another vendor is too much that customer is bound to stick on to the original vendor. In case of Firebase, it may case to such situations where customer founds themselves in difficult situations to switch from Firebase to another platform due to its proprietary services and APIs.
3. Cost: cost is often consider a drawback in case Firebase when our apps starts scaling to large level or user traffic increases.

Firebase is a great platform which provide us with numerous of features and applications such authentication, real time database, storage security and many more such thing. However their are some limitations too which you can consider while using Firebase. Lets see some of the limitations :

1. Maximum number of database you can use per project is 100. You can increase the limit if you want by contacting the support.
2. You can use maximum of 10 MB API request size in your project.
3. The limited size for a document is 1 MB (1,048,576 bytes).
4. Limits on data collection and event reporting. This may limit the analytical report of our application.

Overall, Firebase is great platform to use. There are many applications and benefits of using Firebase such as authentications, storage, real time data base , great security and many more. There are many companies which use firebase such as Duolingo, Accenture, Trivago, Alibaba, Instacart, Lyft and many more. It is also supported in many platform such as iOS, Android and Web too.

In this article, we have provided a closer look to all the benefits of using Firebase. We have discussed pros and cons of Firebase too. There are more benefits of using Firebase than the limitations. In short, if you want to handle a large traffic in your application, Firebase can be idol choice.