Literally yesterday a friend linked the announcement of Firebase Studio with AI building of apps on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIRCBFCyk4X/?igsh=OHlraW5jYWt...
Which is quite different
Ask HN: Does any one know if Firebase is a successful from Google's perspective?
11–20 of 22 posts
Re: Ask HN: Does any one know if Firebase is a successful from Google's perspective?
#12For big companies like this, I like to go look at the activity on sdks and related projects. Typically activity will flat line before a sun setting announcement is made. Its hard to say how much lead time that buys you, but I have found it a useful barometer.
It seems like the firebase repos have had a fair amount of activity.
Re: Ask HN: Does any one know if Firebase is a successful from Google's perspective?
#13I don't see Google ending firebase anytime soon, but I don't like building inside of closed systems anymore.
It's very very difficult to migrate to a different service provider. Since Firebase is ultimately closed source, it's not your app. Your sharing it with Google.
Running a custom solution with Render(Heroku, etc) takes a bit more effort, but it's mine. I can actually open source it. I have more control.
For my current project I went from Firebase, to Superbase and settled on Django. I have some fairly complex logic and supabase just wasn't cutting it.
Re: Ask HN: Does any one know if Firebase is a successful from Google's perspective?
#14Re: Ask HN: Does any one know if Firebase is a successful from Google's perspective?
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah but if you need features like Cloud Functions or SMS auth you have to give your credit card... with no spending limit... and the standard practice is to expose your firebase creds on the client... and their stated stance is its better to let you get attacked and then maybe waive the charges than to interrupt service to your site for a few hours... lol. Your recourse is to go viral on social media and get them to…
It's annoying, but I'm not aware of anywhere you can get SMS auth without similar issues? Would love to learn if there are any.
Supabase does. It has a spending cap, so you won't wake up to a 100k bill if you get hacked. An app I recently consulted for used fireabase SMS auth. Someone spammed their sign-in page and they were hit with multiple 4-figure charges. Firebase refuses to refund of course. Its a great model until it really, really isn't.
Re: Ask HN: Does any one know if Firebase is a successful from Google's perspective?
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
They didn't shut down Parse though. You just had to self-host it. But somehow when Big Tech drops support for anything, people just migrate out of it for no reason and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like Flutter careers are completely dead in the water now. One of my businesses has been running on Parse Server for half a decade and there's still updates on Parse. And despite being "dead", I still find Parse e…
Fair point. But only a small minority of back end as a service users are comfortable with self hosting something like Parse. Enterprises really like having someone to sue when things go wrong. And indie devs who pick BaaS offerings do so in large part to avoid the hassle of self hosting.
A bit off topic, but I wrote a guide to do this on Herok for anyone curious: https://smuzani.medium.com/setting-up-a-mobile-backend-serve...
I'm not sure if it's still valid but it's not too hard, and still much easier to maintain than dealing with AWS. I have basic AWS proficiency, but it's still good to have Heroku to not think about it.
Re: Ask HN: Does any one know if Firebase is a successful from Google's perspective?
#17Re: Ask HN: Does any one know if Firebase is a successful from Google's perspective?
#18Firebase justifies its existence by serving as a customer acquisition vehicle for GCP. This is actually quite valuable given the huge marketing costs required to get a new enterprise cloud customer. You're likely concerned about the precedent of Facebook shutting down Parse back in the day, leaving many projects stranded. Facebook though had no real commercial interest in cloud services back then.
They didn't shut down Parse though. You just had to self-host it. But somehow when Big Tech drops support for anything, people just migrate out of it for no reason and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like Flutter careers are completely dead in the water now. One of my businesses has been running on Parse Server for half a decade and there's still updates on Parse. And despite being "dead", I still find Parse e…
Why are flutter careers dead?
Re: Ask HN: Does any one know if Firebase is a successful from Google's perspective?
#19They just launched https://firebase.studio
Re: Ask HN: Does any one know if Firebase is a successful from Google's perspective?
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
They didn't shut down Parse though. You just had to self-host it. But somehow when Big Tech drops support for anything, people just migrate out of it for no reason and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like Flutter careers are completely dead in the water now. One of my businesses has been running on Parse Server for half a decade and there's still updates on Parse. And despite being "dead", I still find Parse e…
Why are flutter careers dead?
Google laid off the Flutter team. They still seem to be releasing Flutter announcements but it's slow.
One big part of Flutter was that it was a hedge against Java lawsuits back in the day. The other was that it was experimenting with some mobile code, like designing it around lifecycles and all the async UI. But now the same paradigms have been adopted by iOS and Android.
Unlike BE, mobile moves quite quickly too; the last few years have been deprecating a lot of things like push notification security and file access. Mostly to deal with dark patterns. So a platform that isn't in active maintenance tends to fall apart quickly like we've seen with many mobile libraries, Cordova, etc.