Ian Barber
Aug 9, 2017 · 2 min read

Firebase DevRel here — thank you for feedback the good (hosting!) and bad (the rest!) parts. We know there’s a lot more we can do on Firebase to keep improving and its really valuable to us to see what frustrates you, so thank you for taking the time to write it up!

While I don’t have any easy answers, we’ve heard some of these pieces of feedback before, and are in-progress on some improvements, some of being:

Database

Absolutely agree on the lack of querying functionality, and some of the other limitations you mention — we’re actually working on some new functionality there, so if you’re interested in trying something please consider the Alpha program: https://firebase.google.com/alpha and mention this post in the comment!

Cloud Functions

Local test — we launched the HTTPs support just before IO, and we’re keenly aware of the need for a more robust story there. Its actively in progress, as is one of the thing we’ve really wanted to iterate on while in beta.

Cron jobs — yep, this has been a #1 feature request for a while, and is definitely on the list. We have a similar workaround using AppEngine Cron: https://firebase.googleblog.com/2017/03/how-to-schedule-cron-jobs-with-cloud.html

Authentication

Email templating — we offer some of this via the console, but we know we need to do more here!

Custom claims / auth database — you can add custom claims to a custom auth token, but not to the generated Firebase ID Token. The storage is managed by the Google Identity team, who also run all Google login. We are looking at improving our docs to make the user-in-DB situation a bit easier to get started with!

Really interesting thoughts about serverless in general— feel like those deserve a more detailed response, so will try and get back to you separately there!

    Ian Barber

    Written by

    General enthusiast.