Everything You Need To Know About Firebase

Developed by Google, Firebase is an app development platform that provides developers with a variety of tools and services to build high-quality applications (web and mobile), deliver rich user experiences, and improve scalability. From startups to large enterprises, it is loved by app development teams all over the world.

Firebase is a Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) model that frees developers from certain backend tasks. They don’t need to manage servers or write APIs, Firebase does that all gracefully with its own infrastructure. The tools simplify the workflow of developers by providing them with development kits and an online dashboard. These toolkits are scalable, interconnected, and integrable with third-party software to overcome certain complex challenges. Firebase tools cover a wide range of services that developers would normally have to build themselves such as authentication, analytics, file storage, databases, push notifications, etc.

The services are hosted in the cloud and are fully maintained and operated by Google. There is little to no involvement of developers. Firebase’s client SDKs interact with these backend services directly, without having to establish any middleware between your app and the service. This doesn’t happen in traditional app development where you have to work on both Frontend and Backend, and that’s the reason for Firebase getting the limelight.

Firebase has categorized its products into three parts mainly-

1. Build

2. Release and Monitor

3. Engage

The products in the first section focus on swiftly delivering value to the users. Products in the second section are primarily aimed towards improving the app quality with less time and effort. The final section is all about optimizing the app experience and boosting user engagement. Although the sections are categorized, you may find some products listed in more than one section.

Section-A: Build

1. Authentication

It supports authentication using passwords, phone numbers, Google, and other social apps such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. Developers can use Firebase Authentication to integrate one or more login methods into an application and verify users securely through both email and social login. This is extremely difficult to implement on your own but the job gets pretty easy with Firebase.

2. Realtime Database and Cloud Firestore

Realtime Database is a NoSQL database hosted on Cloud that allows you to store and sync data between your users in real-time and helps you develop serverless apps with strong security features. It is also optimized for offline use. When online, the local data syncs automatically but as soon as the users go offline, the Realtime Database SDKs utilize the stored cache on the device to store and serve changes.

Cloud Firebase is similar to Realtime Database. It’s a fully managed NoSQL database for web and mobile app development that lets you store, sync, and query app data on a global scale.

3. Cloud Functions

Cloud Functions is a serverless framework for building and connecting cloud services. It allows app developers to automatically write and deploy backend codes to respond to the events triggered by Firebase features and HTTPS requests without requiring to deal with any servers. Cloud Functions eliminates the burden of managing servers, configuring software, updating frameworks, and patching operating systems. It is fully managed by Google and you just have to add code. Moreover, provisioning of resources occurs automatically in response to events which means that a function can scale from a few invocations a day to millions without you having to do any work.

4. Hosting

Firebase hosting is a fully managed web content hosting service that provides fast and secure hosting for static and dynamic content as well as microservices. It lets you quickly deploy web apps and serve both static and dynamic content to a global CDN (Content Delivery Network) using a single command. To ensure that the content is delivered securely every time, zero-configuration SSL is built into Firebase.

Another great thing about Firebase hosting is that you can pair it up with Cloud Functions to build and host microservices on Firebase. It lets you proxy the request and response to and from Cloud Functions when writing HTTP type functions.

5. Cloud Storage

Built for Google scale, Cloud Storage is a simple yet powerful and cost-effective file storage service that enables developers to store and serve user-generated content such as photos and videos using the Firebase SDKs. It can accumulate and serve a huge amount of files in the Google Cloud Storage bucket, thereby making them accessible through both Google Cloud and Firebase. The Firebase SDKs for Cloud Storage work seamlessly with Firebase Authentication to identify users.

6. Firebase ML

It was earlier known as ML Kit for Firebase that allowed you to leverage the Machine Learning expertise from Google for Android and iOS applications irrespective of whether you are experienced or a novice in Machine Learning. You could implement the functionality you require in the matter of a few lines of code.

With Firebase ML, you can augment your app with powerful machine learning features with ready-to-use APIs and also use it to train and deploy custom models with the help of the TensorFlow Lite model.

7. Cloud Messaging

Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) lets you send customized, targeted, and automated push notifications across platforms at no cost and without any sort of coding required. You can also perform A/B testing to see which notification brings out the best results.

Section-B: Release and Monitor

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics for Firebase helps you gain significant insights about your users including their behavior such as how they use your app and what actions they are performing inside it, thereby helping you make better marketing strategies and product optimization techniques. It provides you with free and unlimited reporting for up to 500 different events.

2. Performance Monitoring

This is a real-time app performance monitoring tool that you can use to track how your app is performing and address the arising issues which can often occur while rolling out new features or updating configuration settings. It consists of a customizable dashboard that allows you to focus on your key metrics.

3. Test Lab

Firebase Test Lab allows you to test your app on real and virtual devices that simulate actual environments. You don’t need to code to test your app. Firebase has a smart crawler “Robo” that automatically browses your entire app and looks for the bugs. If there are any, it reports those crashes and captures screenshots so that you can spot errors beforehand.

4. App Distribution

Firebase App Distribution allows you to distribute the pre-release versions of your Android and iOS app to trusted testing engineers which can be done using the console or your CI servers. This helps your receive timely and valuable feedback on Usability.

5. Remote Configuration

Remote Configuration lets you release new features safely and steadily and ensure the app is stable and not having any performance issues. It offers visibility and better control over the behavior and appearance of your app and allows you to adjust changes by simply updating its configuration from the Firebase console. All this can be done without having to release a new version or set up complex infrastructure.

Section-C: Engage

1. Predictions

Firebase predictions let you leverage the power of Machine Learning and apply it to predict future user behavior. It creates segments based on user behavior and provides you insights into which segment of users are likely to purchase or turn away.

2. Crashlytics

Crashlytics in Firebase is a great reporting tool that gives you an overview of the issues your users might encounter or how the crashes are affecting the way users use your app. The tool lets you prioritize and fix those crashes based on their impact and works well with other tools for bug tracking and project management like Slack, Jira, etc.

3. Dynamic Links

Dynamic Links in Firebase are smart URLs that let you send prospects to any location within your iOS and Android app. What’s best about them is that they survive the app installation process which means when the user clicks on a dynamic link and the app isn’t already installed, they are redirected to the app store to install it. And once they launch the app for the first time, they are displayed the content they were looking for. Alternately, the context of the link is retained and the users are at a place where they initially intended to be.

4. In-App Messaging

Firebase In-App Messaging allows you to send targeted and contextual messages to users to complete certain actions inside the app like purchasing an item. This helps you engage the active users of your app and thus boosts user engagement. You can customize the design and tweak the content as per the audiences and send messages based on their actions and interests. It seamlessly integrates with Analytics and Predictions and offers you advanced targeting capabilities.

5. A/B Testing

Firebase A/B Testing lets you test your app’s UI, features, or engagement campaigns and helps you improve your app by making it easy to run, analyze, and scale product and marketing experiments.

Final Word

By now, you would have realized that Firebase is absolutely amazing. It bypasses the traditional backend process and puts the work into the client, which eliminates a great amount of workload. And there’s no limit to the type of apps that can be helped with Firebase although it does have limited platforms where it can be used. If you haven’t started using Firebase yet, it’s high time that you do.