Why use Firebase as Cloud Back-End for Mobile Applications

In today’s world we have mobile app for almost every thing we are doing in our daily life. Most of the businesses have their mobile apps to keep user engaged with them. Following are the 7 must have features for every mobile app

• Social media integration
• Analytics
• Offline capabilities
• Gamification
• Feedback mechanism
• Personalization options
• Engagement through notification

Besides those features, there are usually simple business logic to read/write data from server after validations and perform simple processing according to business rules. Not for all applications but most of it have more than 50% of API’s that are just using for CRUD operations. Also it put load on our server too as for each and everything device request server to do it.

For this kind of applications firebase cloud is an ideal solution to me due to the following reasons.

• It provide you real-time database, which can handle your basic CRUD operation directly with the client.
• It also provides you notifications of the data changes via observer pattern.
• We can also apply basic data validations and user access restrictions using firebase rules.
• Firebase Cloud is also providing you almost all the must have features listed above and can easily be integrated. Offline support and push notifications can be implemented very easily as compare to the server implementation.
• Chat feature is also very easy to implement with Firebase Real-time database as compare to serve side implementation.

When it comes to cost, Firebase Cloud is an optimal solution. Firebase’s paid infrastructure features are the Real-time Database, Storage, Hosting, and Test Lab. However, they offer a free tier for all of these features. Firebase Analytics, App Indexing, Authentication, Cloud Messaging, Crash Reporting, Dynamic Links, Invites, Notifications & Remote Config are included free.

So It means firebase is free initially and then pay as you go approach will be applied which is also not very costly as compare to the server cost that anyone have to bear in case of traditional server approach. Pricing details of Firebase Cloud can be found here.

Here the point comes that what if my app has to use some third party API’s or having some complex features like Elastic search etc. Shouldn’t we go with the Firebase Cloud for this kind of requirements?

Answer is Why Not!!! You can do anything you want with this approach. You can use any server with firebase Queue for any complex task that should be performing on server side. I’ll not go in detail but you can find here that how can it be implemented using firebase queue.

So long story short, firebase can be a very useful tool for rapid and efficient development of mobile applications, which has a greater flexibility to scale.