So, What is Firebase?
Firebase is an app development platform that provides the necessary tools to help you build and run successful Mobile or Web Apps. It’s owned and backed by Google and is already in use by millions of businesses and their engineering & development teams around the world — from startups to global enterprises.
Firebase is pretty amazing and it’s why we built our CMS, Flamelink, on top of it and for it. Firebase launched in April 2012 after evolving and pivoting from Envolve in 2011 when Firebase was founded as a separate company. Fast forward to 2014 when Google acquired Firebase. Since then Firebase and Google have acquired a number of other developer tools and applications to add to the ever-growing Firebase ecosystem.
FIREBASE PRODUCTS
Firebase makes the lives of developers easy by doing some awesome stuff right out of the box. The ever-growing suite of products and ecosystem make it a firm favorite amongst the developer community given that it takes on so many of the tasks that you typically require a large team of developers to build from scratch or execute for an application.
Firebase’s very impressive ecosystem of products can be divided into three categories: Build, Release & Monitor, and Engage. We’ll cover each of these categories and products in future editions of the Flamelink blog.
BUILD:
Firebase’s Build products offer Dev teams a fully managed backend infrastructure that easily solves common app development challenges and allows them to spin up their backend to accelerate app development and scale to support millions of users.
Firebase ‘Build’ products include:
- Cloud Firestore
- Realtime Database
- Remote Config
- Firebase Extensions
- App Check
- Cloud Functions
- Authentication
- Cloud Messaging
- Hosting
- Cloud Storage
- Firebase Machine Learning
RELEASE & MONITORING:
Release your apps with confidence and Monitor their performance and stability. With Firebase’s Release & Monitoring products, you’ll be able to pinpoint, prioritize, and fix stability and performance issues early with the simplification of the testing, triaging, and troubleshooting process.
Improve app quality in less time with less effort by carefully rolling out features and monitoring adoption.
Firebase ‘Release & Monitoring’ products are:
ENGAGE:
Optimize your app experience and keep users happy with Firebase’s ‘Engage’ products.
The ‘Engage’ suite of products is used to boost user engagement with rich analytics, AB testing, and messaging campaigns that help you understand your users to better support and retain them. Test new ideas and gather new insights to customize your app for different user segments.
Here are the Firebase ‘Engage’ products:
- Remote Config
- Google Analytics
- AB Testing
- Authentication
- Cloud Messaging
- Crashlytics
- Dynamic Links
- In-App Messaging
THE FIREBASE COMMUNITY:
The Firebase community of developers is a vibrant one. The way they help and support the community is one of the primary reasons for this and it’s how the Firebase team likes to look after their users and their community. The Firebase team themselves are all over the place answering questions, helping users, and adding value on places like the Firebase Slack workspace community, Stack Overflow, Reddit and the Firebase Talk Google Group etc.
Firebase also currently has a number of Google Developer Experts in Firebase based all over the world with their mission to help grow and support the Firebase Community.
The annual Firebase Summit which was first hosted in Berlin in 2016 is very popular and always well attended by developers traveling from all over the world to get together with the Firebase community, network with one another, engage with the Firebase team listen to informative talks and generally support what the Firebase team is doing. Aside from 2020 and 2021, there has been an in-person Firebase Summit every year since 2016 including Amsterdam in 2017, Prague in 2018, Madrid in 2019, and most recently New York in 2022. We covered the 2022 Firebase Summit in this article on our blog.
Check out the Playlists for each year’s Summit Sessions below:
Firebase Dev Summit 2016 (Berlin)
Firebase Dev Summit 2017 (Amsterdam)
Firebase Summit 2018 (Prague)
Firebase Summit 2019 (Madrid)
Firebase Summit 2020 (Online)
Firebase Summit 2021 (Online)
Firebase Summit 2022 (New York)
It’s been said that Firebase has a cult-like following, something that is evident in not only users engaging online and on social media, but the cheers that ring out when anything Firebase is announced at a non-Firebase specific Google event like Google IO.
Firebase has shown a steady increase in user numbers. During the Firebase Summit keynote address, the Firebase team shares how Firebase has grown. It’s had a steady, consistent growth of around 500’000 apps being added to Firebase each year.
FIREBASE EXTENSIONS
At the 2022 Firebase Summit, Firebase announced the Extensions Marketplace by Firebase. This massively exciting announcement comes off the back of the last few years of Firebase rolling out and nurturing the Firebase Extensions program which essentially allows developers to build and publish their own extensions to help make the Firebase ecosystem even more user-friendly and more powerful.
With the launch of Firebase Extensions adding additional dimensions and capabilities to the Firebase ecosystem, we believe that Firebase is going to grow even more in popularity, especially in the enterprise and Cloud solution solace given its already powerful product set and the addition of Firebase Extensions by trusted Dev and Engineering teams like Algolia, Stripe, Mailchimp, Twilio and more.
GET STARTED WITH FIREBASE
Why don’t you head over to the Firebase Console and take Firebase for a spin? See how effortlessly you can take your next Dev project to market with Firebase’s powerful suite of Products and Extensions.
While you’re at it, add Flamelink to your Firebase project to see how easily we make content management in Firebase for you and your team.
For a quick start to Firebase & Flamelink, check out this article on the Official Firebase Blog.
