Firebase – A Revolutionary Mobile Platform by Google

Firebase is the all in one complete solution for mobile application developers to program end to end mobile app. It works really well with features like Authentication, Real Time Database, Analytics, Storage, Notification, Dynamic Links, Crash Reporting, Invites etc. It provides realtime backend to developer application quickly. So basically, Firebase is a mobile platform to perform these many features from one place.

Firebase is a quick solution for developers to create Mobile Apps (Android and IOS) and Web Apps without any kind of Backend support (web API). Let’s discuss some of the features of Firebase.

1 ) Analytics – Firebase analytics help us to know the behaviour of our user , it has number of events which are captured automatically, and we can also create custom events.

2 ) Authentication – Before firebase, developers use to manage different Authentication from different places, now It can manage them all from one place. (Ex. Can manage Google Authentication, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Github and Email/Password login in one Firebase Project)

3 ) Real Time Database – Firebase let us store data in Key/Value Format. In a way it has direct support for Document Based database which can grow any time at any level both in terms of storage size and attributes. It is very quick and speedy and provides features like offline sync. For data store, It requires to set some rules in our database.

Here is one of the sample example:

This collection of codes shows the user who is not authorized by Firebase and also who don’t have permission to Read and Write.

4 ) Storage – Firebase is very much diverse in terms of storage type. Apart from textual information; It can store any sort of file.(Ex. Images, PDF, DOC etc), Interesting aspect is, It gives a feature to update the metadata of the file. This holds lots of possibilities in terms of content discovery, content manipulation, and updation unlike typical relational database management system.

5 ) Notification – Conventionally all push notification in Android devices are delivered through GCM. While Firebase support different approach. It has FCM instead of GCM.. There is no change in the performance or reliability in FCM, Firebase allows sending three types of Notifications directly to users.

• USER SEGMENT: Sends the notification to all users within the App, and to handle notification in the foreground, you have to perform some message handling login in the Client app.
• TOPIC: Sends notification topic wise. Notifications will be received to only those user who subscribes to that notification topic.
• SINGLE DEVICE: You can send a notification to that particular user. You can just pass the FCM Token to the user and notification will be fired for only that user.

6 ) Dynamic Links – Create links to open application in your device. If it gets open then won’t create any issue, otherwise, it will directly navigate to the user to download the app from play store. Create links for IOS and Android App to move the user to relevant content in the App. You can view statistics of the link from Firebase console.

7 ) Crash Reporting – Get all crash log of your application in crash reporting part. It will report automatically to the developer when there is any crash from the user’s side.

8 ) Invites – It’s a new way to invite user for app installation. You can set share method like SMS and Email. You can also set message, dynamic links (which will navigate the user to the application directly), Intents, email title intents and can see statistics of the app sharing.

9 ) Test lab – Firebase Test Lab gives you experience to test your app in wide range of devices. It provides Logs, Videos and Screenshots in firebase console for each device. Your app code will run in Google Data Center. Test Lab will help you to find issues for particular devices.

10 ) Remote config – Remote Config helps you to update your application without submitting it on store, can change the app behaviour and appearance without updating the app. Once you place default value for it then you can change it from firebase console. Later it will continuously check for the update and behave according to the current configuration.

11 ) App Indexing – App Indexing helps to search your application or Content on the Google no matter it is public or personal. It also have features like search for the Content, Direct install button, Autocompletion for Searching etc.

12 ) Admob – Admob helps to generate revenue from your app with advertisements. Ads can be displayed as banner ads, interstitial ads, video ads, or native ads.

Firebase Analytics, App Indexing, Cloud Messaging, Authentication, Dynamic Links, Crash Reporting, Notifications, Invites & Remote Config is absolutely free and we can perform any of this feature without worrying about payments.

For other services, it has three plans (SPARK,FLAME and BLAZE) according to the application usage. Find more details about it on https://firebase.google.com/pricing/

Here we have discussed some of the basic feature list of the Firebase. And there is many more yet to come. If you have a business app or thinking to begin, then look it’s no further than Firebase. 9series is having a team of best mobile application developers that develop business apps, with the target of aiding their businesses in growing with their client bases and increasing their profits through their mobile apps.