Live data from Hacker News

Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

firebase.googleblog.com

21–30 of 214 posts

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#21
post #4

(firebase founder here) I’m thrilled to finally be able to show everyone what we’ve been working on over the last 18 months! When I said “big things are coming” in the HN comments back when our acquisition was announced, I was talking about today : ) We’re really excited about these new products. There are some big advances on the development side, with a new storage solution, integrated push messaging, remote config…

New dashboard look & feel is awesome. Lots to digest from that short keynote, but I'm excited to see Google double-down on its investment (Hi, Facebook). Looks like https://console.firebase.google.com is getting slammed. All of my attempted imports are failing.

Yeah, sorry about that! We're working to get more capacity ASAP. The response has been incredible.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#23
post #9
post #4

(firebase founder here) I’m thrilled to finally be able to show everyone what we’ve been working on over the last 18 months! When I said “big things are coming” in the HN comments back when our acquisition was announced, I was talking about today : ) We’re really excited about these new products. There are some big advances on the development side, with a new storage solution, integrated push messaging, remote config…

Hello there. I love Firebase. Use it every day. The one big request I've always had was to be able to grab the client's IP address on request. Is that possible with this new Firebase and GCE integration? I have many Firebase apps. Most of them have an intermediate server solely for this one reason.

This isn't something we support out of the box yet, but I'll definitely discuss this with the team. Thanks for the feedback!

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#25
post #2

This may be a stupid question, but: What do you use it for? Cannot everyone basically edit the client code and do whatever with your data? I've only used Firebase for prototyping.

That's what the Database Security Rules [1] are for. If you want to learn more, check out my I/O talk tomorrow called "The key to Firebase security" [2].

[1] http://firebase.google.com/docs/database/security [2] https://events.google.com/io2016/schedule?sid=af641ff7-0bef-...

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New dashboard look & feel is awesome. Lots to digest from that short keynote, but I'm excited to see Google double-down on its investment (Hi, Facebook). Looks like https://console.firebase.google.com is getting slammed. All of my attempted imports are failing.

Yeah, sorry about that! We're working to get more capacity ASAP. The response has been incredible.

I assume you just pulled a comically-large lever in your office, because it just worked!

Thanks, and congrats.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#27
We were part of the Early Access Program for the expanded Firebase and used it to build our music collaboration app Kwaver. With the new features, they did a nice job of collecting a bunch of related mobile products (Analytics, Push Notifications, Storage, Authentication, Database, Deep Linking, etc) into a pretty cohesive platform, and it's saved us a bunch of time.

With Firebase Analytics we can track events, segment audiences (according to user properties; active, dormant, inactive) and take action according to the user segment. We are able to send push notifications (also using Firebase) to dormant male users who play the piano for example. Another cool feature is Remote Config, which gives you the option to ship a number of separate experiences and track the user interaction. Like A/B Testing but way more flexible.

For us, the best product is the existing database product they had, as it really improves our user experience to ditch the 'pull to refresh' button' and have our app respond to changes live.

We have been waiting for Google to provide developers a more complete mobile solution for a while now, and they’ve done it superbly through Firebase!

Feedback; It would be really cool if Firebase could implement UTM codes to be able to track user acquisition and be able to automate actions according to User Properties.

Shameless plug: if you're a musician (or a music fan), we'd really appreciate if you could download our music collaboration app, try it out and give us feedback. It’s available for free on the app store; The following link will re-direct you there later today. http://kwaver.com

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#28

way too risky to use it for startups. Google may discontinue this project at any time and you have to spend months to rewrite everything for another database. IF google open source it and we will be able to install it on premise and patch without Google, that would be ok. So, I would recommend to use PostgreSQL instead.

Recommend looking at Rethinkdb :) They just announced Horizon too.

Re: Firebase expands to become a unified app platform

#30
post #4

(firebase founder here) I’m thrilled to finally be able to show everyone what we’ve been working on over the last 18 months! When I said “big things are coming” in the HN comments back when our acquisition was announced, I was talking about today : ) We’re really excited about these new products. There are some big advances on the development side, with a new storage solution, integrated push messaging, remote config…

You should never use products like this where you are completely vendor-locked and will be unable to switch easily to another provider. I did this mistake before and we used SQL Azure Federations (cool & cheap autosharding for SQL Server), then Microsoft decided to discontinue it and provide only very expensive up-scale version of SQL Server instead. We spend months to migrate our product to PostgreSQL... and this is just an example, Google also love to discontinue products, probably even more than Microsoft.
Post reply on HN