App usage rates are skyrocketing day by day. And the state of application development is not the same anymore. In order to master the realm of application development, businesses and enterprises should look for smarter strategies. In this regard, Firebase is a popular platform that enables you to make the ‘smart move’.

In this blog, let’s explore Firebase, its features, and advantages, and see who's using it.



Firebase - A Comprehensive App Development Platform

At some point, some of us might have heard the story of Envolve. Back in 2011, the startup Envolve was used by developers to integrate online chat functionality into websites. But, they started using Envolve to pass and sync real-time application data other than the chat messages. This prompted the founders of Envolve to explore further opportunities using the platform. They separated the chat functionality and real-time architecture. Finally, in 2012, they formed Firebase as a stand-alone company.

Firebase is a web and mobile app development platform that provides backend-as-a-service. In 2014, it was acquired by Google and has been evolved into a full-fledged, unified platform with 18 products. It is currently being used in 1.5 million apps.



Also read: Off-the-shelf v/s Custom-software - Which to choose

Why Firebase?

Since its inception, Firebase has evolved into a powerful application development platform, helping development teams and businesses to succeed globally. What makes Firebase attractive is its wide variety of products, aimed at solving critical enterprise challenges and stimulating business growth. These products are offered to the users at affordable rates along with its backend service. Hence, the effort and time required for writing additional services can be allocated for other critical tasks.



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Builds better apps



Firebase helps you to build better-performing, scalable, and secure applications using its world-class infrastructure.

The Realtime Database in Firestore uses a NoSQL, cloud-hosted database to store and sync data real-time between users and devices. Further, the Cloud Storage for Firebase stores and saves user-generated contents such as images, audio, and video more smoothly. Using Cloud Functions, you can scale your applications during any time of its life cycle without scaling the servers in use.

Hosting and authentication are fairly easily handled in Firebase with simple methods and efficient tools. The ready-to-use Firebase ML Kit APIs meticulously add advanced machine learning features to the application. The good news is that your limited knowledge and inexperience with machine learning would not be an obstacle to add a bit of intelligence into the developed application.



Improves app quality



Firebase enables businesses like yours to gain useful insights from applications and utilize it for user-centric application development. To achieve this, Firebase offers a set of tools for testing, real-time crash reporting, and performance monitoring.

Crashlytics in iOS reports crashes real-time, finds the crash source, and prioritizes crashes based on user impact. This form of a real-time crash alert service reduces the troubleshooting time required in normal scenarios and helps to take appropriate steps to combat the issue before it begins to deteriorate.

Firebase also provides a testing environment using both physical and virtual devices. The intelligent crawler, Robo, spots errors and reports them even before users notice it. This test lab service is available in both Android and iOS.

For businesses, it is always advantageous to see how their app is performing on the user’s device. A deep analysis into the app’s performance on user device helps to understand the issues and scope of improvement. Today, it is practical with Firebase backend-as-a-service where all performance-related data are available on the dashboard.



Also read: Using Firebase Realtime Database in Android



Promotes business growth



Firebase is an ideal platform to retain loyal users, increase user engagement and attract new users. It provides the right set of products to engage more users, gain insights, improve apps and deliver the perfect app experience.

Google Analytics and Predictions provide data after analyzing user behavior from acquisition to app usage. The data so obtained can be used for in-app messages and other messaging campaigns to engage existing users and attract new users.

Customization and improvements become easier with such a data-driven approach and lead to an increase in revenue. As an add-on benefit, you can easily modify your app version built using Firebase without deploying a new version.

Firebase also offers business growth products such as App Indexing and Dynamic Links. These products drive search traffic to your mobile apps and deep link users to the right places with the app.



Easy to integrate



Firebase can be easily integrated on the web, iOS, and Android. The APIs are packaged into a single SDK and can be easily expanded to the ‘n’ number of platforms. Languages such as C++ and Unity also works seamlessly with Firebase as the unified backend.

Key integrations with Google Ads, AdMob, Google Marketing Platform, Play Store, Data Studio, BigQuery, and Slack opens up a world of opportunities for all types of businesses.



Solves the most demanding business challenges



In a nutshell, Firebase has the solutions for all the critical business challenges. It progressively rolls out new features after testing it on a subset of users. This ensures that the new version is received well and works impeccably.

Firebase gives users a simple yet, secure onboarding flow while signing up. The onboarding process is monitored further to understand the scope of improvement. While chat options always prove to be a tricky situation, Firebase has a workaround for it. It implements user-friendly chat features so that users can easily converse with each other without leaving the app.



Read more: How to Handle Post Development Phase of Your Web Application

Businesses Using Firebase

Firebase is trusted by the largest apps such as:

Read more: Progressive Web Apps: Why Your Business Needs It?

Conclusion

Firebase is a major performance booster for businesses. NPR and Fabulous are some examples of pioneers who reaped the best benefits out of Flutter.

With the help of Analytics and JQuery in Firebase, NPR followed the user journey across multiple devices and derived smarter insights out of it. This understanding was later used to increase engagement rates by showing contents that fell into the user’s interest areas. Similarly, Fabulous saw twice the user retention with customized onboarding flow. The remarkable point is that it took them only a single day to implement these customized onboarding screens.

Personally, I recommend Firebase as it reduces the time and effort required for major backend tasks. I have seen our development team executing complex tasks faster and smarter with Firebase. The various products offered by Firebase makes it more productive and useful. It solves all scalability and performance monitoring challenges. It is because of these reasons we majorly prefer Firebase for our application development services.

For further reading, you can also check out my material on Building a Mobile App using Firebase without Cloud Server.

Get in touch to know how your business idea can be turned into an efficient business product.

