Introduction
Firebase is a product of Google which helps developers to build, manage, and grow their apps easily. It helps developers to build their apps faster and in a more secure way. No programming is required on the firebase side which makes it easy to use its features more efficiently. It provides services to android, ios, web, and unity. It provides cloud storage. It uses NoSQL for the database for the storage of data.
Features of Firebase:
Mainly there are 3 categories in which firebase provides its services:
Build Better Applications:
This feature mainly includes backend services that help developers to build and manage their applications in a better way. Services included under this feature are :
Realtime Database: The Firebase Realtime Database is a cloud-based NoSQL database that manages your data at the blazing speed of milliseconds. In simplest term, it can be considered as a big JSON file.
Cloud Firestore: The cloud Firestore is a NoSQL document database that provides services like store, sync, and query through the application on a global scale. It stores data in the form of objects also known as Documents. It has a key-value pair and can store all kinds of data like, strings, binary data, and even JSON trees.
Authentication: Firebase Authentication service provides easy to use UI libraries and SDKs to authenticate users to your app. It reduces the manpower and effort required to develop and maintain the user authentication service. It even handles tasks like merging accounts, which if done manually can be hectic.
Remote Config: The remote configuration service helps in publishing updates to the user immediately. The changes can range from changing components of the UI to changing the behavior of the applications. These are often used while publishing seasonal offers and contents to the application that has a limited life.
Hosting: Firebase provides hosting of applications with speed and security. It can be used to host Stati or Dynamic websites and microservices. It has the capability of hosting an application with a single command.
Firebase Cloud Messaging(FCM): The FCM service provides a connection between the server and the application end users, which can be used to receive and send messages and notifications. These connections are reliable and battery-efficient.
Improve app quality:
Here majorly all the application performance and testing features are provided. All the features required to check and manage before launching your application officially are provided in this section. Services included are:
Crashlytics: It is used to get real-time crash reports. These reports can further be used to improve the quality of the application. The most interesting part of this service is that it gives a detailed description of the crash which is easier to analyze for the developers.
Performance monitoring: This service gives an insight to the performance characteristics of the applications. The performance monitoring SDK can be used to receive performance data from the application, review them, and make changes to the application accordingly through the Firebase console.
Test lab: This service helps to test your applications on real and virtual devices provided by Google which are hosted on the Google Datacenters. It is a cloud-based app-testing infrastructure which supports testing the application on a wide variety of devices and device configurations.
App Distribution: This service is used to pre-release applications that can be tested by trusted testers. It comes in handy as decreases the time required to receive feedback from the testers.
Grow Your App:
This feature provides your application analytics and features that can help you to interact with your user and make predictions that help you to grow your app. Services provided are:
Google analytics: It is a Free app measurement service provided by Google that provides insight on app usage and user engagement. It serves unlimited reporting for up to 500 distinct automatic or user-defined events using the Firebase SDK.
Predictions: Firebase Predictions uses machine learning to the application’s analytics data, further creating dynamic user segments that are based on your user’s behavior. These are automatically available to use for the application through Firebase Remote Config, the Notifications composer, Firebase In-App Messaging, and A/B Testing.
Dynamic Links: Deeps Links are links that directly redirects user to specific content. Firebase provides a Dynamic linking service that converts deep links into dynamic links which can directly take the user to a specified content inside the application. Dynamic links are used for converting web users to Native app users. It also increases the conversion of user-to-user sharing. In addition, it can also be used to integrate social media networks, emails, and SMS to increase user engagement inside the application.
A/B Testing: It is used to optimize the application’s experience by making it run smoothly, scaling the product, and performing marketing experiments.
Firebase Services
We can mainly divide the services provided by the platform into the following parts:
•Develop Services
•Quality Services
•Analytics Services
•Grow services
The development services help us to develop the application in the short span of time, quality services help us to maintain the quality of the app by looking into our crash list, check the performance of your app, Analytics service help to look how the users are engaging with your app and how many conversations are you making per user. The grow service helps as the app grows by doing the advanced prediction about the user behavior and by doing the A/B testing.
Firebase Advantages
Here are the top ten benefits of using Firebase.
- Free to start
- Development speed
- End-to-end app development platform
- Powered by Google
- Developers can focus on frontend development •It’s serverless
- It offers machine learning capabilities •Generates traffic to your apps
- Error monitoring
- Security
Set up Default Cloud Storage Bucket
The first step to implementing Firebase storage is to set up a default cloud storage bucket.
1.On the Firebase console page, select add project and follow the instructions to create a new project.
2.From the left navigation bar, select Storage, and then click on Get Started.
3.For a quick setup, select Start in test mode.
4.Click Next, and choose the cloud storage location.
5.Click on Done.
Features of Firebase
Given below are the features mentioned:
•The real-time data management system is one of the most important features that allow easy and quick change of data to and from the database.
•The possibility to sync data without refreshing the screen is another feature that is heavily used in today’s market.
•The integration with Google Advertising, AdMob is an additional feature resulting from acquiring of Firebase by Google.
•The dashboard is a simple control one.
•It allows the user to choose from a number of services to choose from.
•All repetitive jobs are already present in the service utility of Firebase, thus allowing developers to focus on UI aesthetics.
Conclusion
Firebase is Google’s mobile app development platform. Its advantages include an end-to-end development environment, faster time to market to create apps, and scalable infrastructure. Although it’s a fantastic product, Firebase has downsides. It’s a closed-source platform, has vendor lock-in, and only provides NoSQL databases.
Pricing wise Firebase operates under two different plans. The first one is Spark that provides a generous free tier and encompasses most of Firebase features. The paid plan is called Blaze and works under a usage-based model and charges the application based on the used workload.
Firebase divides its features into three main categories; Build, Release & Monitor, and Engage. These are all employed across various stages of an app development cycle.
