Given Google’s well‑known reputation for discontinuing products that don’t meet its internal success criteria, I’m wondering whether Firebase is considered successful by Google’s standards.
They’ve already begun deprecating individual services under the Firebase umbrella—for example, Firebase Dynamic Links (https://firebase.google.com/support/dynamic-links-faq).
Does anyone know where Firebase’s App Backend‑as‑a‑Service is headed?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Firebase hosting only charges you when an actual thing you've deployed starts getting significant usage. It's a terrific option for small devs who still want custom domains, backend data, and the freedom to code in JS/TS in the browser.
As a small dev firebase is horrifying.
It seems like the firebase repos have had a fair amount of activity.
https://github.com/orgs/firebase/repositories
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.
Like we'd use to allow PMs to change banners/copy on the fly, but Supabase is better. It does RAG but Supabase does that better too. Firebase functions are really good for prototyping, but once it starts to cost money, we move it to AWS. It's good for feature flagging, and we moved that to Growthbook. Analytics started on Firebase and were moved to open source so we'd own the data. The only thing they do well is Crashlytics and that's free.
If everyone was as bad a customer as us, I would assume they're in trouble.
Unfortunately a lot of people have trust issues with Google. We don't want them controlling data and certainly nothing as core as functions, DB, and feature flagging. Then when people don't use these things, Google kills it real fast.