What can Firebase do? It can make you a trillionaire. Period.

Just kidding. 😂

But it can save you a lot of money since you don’t need to buy an expensive server to maintain your app.

Did you know?

Google is really good at predicting the future, that’s a sign of being intelligent. that’s why the big G acquires companies that have great future potential for profit and data 😀

It means Firebase is a Google product, you can trust quality, security and the maintenance of Firebase.

Of course, you may have a love and hate relationship with Google due to privacy issues.

But, the best part of Firebase?

It’s free, unlike your girlfriend that may end up eating all your pizza.

Free? How? The Spark Plan.

Firebase Can Help In 5 Areas of Your App

Firebase Console has divided the product into 4 main categories and one orphan category:

Develop

Quality

Analytics

Grow

Extension

Develop

This portion of the console is related to the actual development of the Firebase projects.

Authentication

Databases

Storage

Hosting

Function

ML Kit

i) Authentication – A Ticket to User Authorization:

Registration is a vital feature of for app (excluding the utility apps), you need to register your users even if you’re building a pizza delivery app.

Firebase supports authentication using passwords, phone numbers, popular federated identity providers like Google, Facebook and Twitter, and more.

And many other authentication methods which you can see in the image below:

ii) Database – Creation and Managing Databases

A database is an organized collection of data, generally stored and accessed electronically from a computer system. Firebase provides two types of databases:

A) Real-time Database:

This is a real-time database. It means when you add some data into your Firebase app, it’ll be added instantly into the Firebase Realtime Database.

What would happen next?

All the clients using your app will get instant updates.

For example, you’re developing a chat app whenever you enter some text and send it to the user, the text is added on instantly in the real-time database.

And at the same time, you can inform the user using notification about the text as well.

Moreover, the real-time database is faster since it uses WebSocket instead of HTTP.

B) Cloud Firestore:

Cloud Firestore lets you store your data in the cloud.

You can sync it across all your devices and share them among multiple users.

Likewise, it presents you with robust client libraries, offline support mode —your app works fine whether you are connected to the data network or not— and a very easy data browsing tool.

It works on near-real-time —like when a change happens in the database it fetches automatically— or you can request to fetch data manually. It’s totally up to you.

The most common features are multi-regional data replication (for extra reliability), strong consistency, multi-document transaction (so you can perform a complex operation on your data).

iii) Storage – Grocery Bucket That Store

Just like you want to store your one picture in a floppy disk that can store whopping 1.44MB, similarly, Firebase allows you to store videos, photos, and GIFs. 😅

Firebase Storage performs the tasks with the help of API that lets your users upload or store files.

Additionally, the files are transferred over secured connections.

One of the best parts of Storage API is to resume a file even if the connection is lost.

It comes up with better security rules since it’s powered by Google Cloud Platform.

iv) Hostings – A Fast with CDN Centric

Firebase hosting service is a dynamic and static web hosting service that is fast, secure and reliable.

Moreover, files are deployed on SSDs and CDN edge servers around the globe. It supports hosting files like (javascript, HTML, CSS, etc), also supports through Cloud Functions.

Don’t have an idea what’s a CDN? It’s a content delivery network that aims your users to deliver your app content from the nearest location from the Google server instead of from the Moon.

v) Function – Changing an App Behavior

Sometimes you need a code that could run on server and can react to users action; that’s what Firebase Cloud funtion do.

Like you want to notify all the participants of a group when someone send a message there; you can ues cloud function for that. You just need to check whenever a change in Firebase Database is made; send a notification.

That’s how easy it is and easily integrable with other Firebase Products!

With Function, you can easily deploy your codes in the back-end server as a service that you manage, then the app uses API to communicate with the server.

Other things you can do with the function feature:

The users who log in for the first time, you can send them an invitation email

You can send a message with FCM (Firebase Cloud Messaging) to users’ friends

You can make your app faster, complete and secure

Did you know? You can write the functions in Javascript and in the Node environment.

v) ML Kit – A Baby That Can Learn

A machine learning kit is a mobile machine learning system for developers.

ML Kit offers you a huge variety of features like face detection, character recognition, image labeling, barcode scanner, and landmark recognition.

Currently, it is available for only iOS and Android.

2. Quality:

Being an app developer, it’s your responsibility for making a quality app that has achieved the level of perfection.

Do you really want to know your app is really awful when it’s in the production phase?

That’s why, Firebase understands your pain and needs, and end up you giving you four features:

i) Crashlytics

With the help of Crashlytics, you can get a detail report of errors of your app. It can work on Android, iOS and unity.

You’ll get a complete picture of what your users are experiencing, and you can work before the users give you a bad review.

ii) Performance

Firebase Performance helps you to analyze performance and latencies into your app. You can see the response time, success rate and the number of requests your app has made.

iii) Test Lab

Firebase Test Lab is a cloud-based infrastructure that is used to test the apps.

Test lab available for both Android and iOS devices. We can test our apps across a huge variety of devices like we can test our apps on different API levels and different mobile phones with different orientations with different screen sizes.

Test results can be collected in Firebase Console. If you didn’t write any code related to testing of the app, the Test Lab automatically collects information about app crashes.

iv) App Distribution

Stability and usability are the main factors of any app success. The best time to fix your app issue is before in the hand of actual users.

You don’t want to learn problems in the Play Store rating section. Getting real users is the best way to identify crashes and get feedback.

App distribution makes it easy to get your app on to the tester devices so that we can fix bugs, crashes before launching the app. Tester gets the email and friendly UI so that they test your app.

Simply upload your APK, IPA on Firebase and your build is immediately sent to testers.

3. Grow:

In this section of the Firebase Console, Firebase gives you a lot of features that let you grow your app and helps you to get more profit for your company. it includes the following features.

i) Predictions

With the help of this feature, we can identify which user might stop using your app in the near future.

So we can personalize the app for that group of users using remote config.

Moreover, we can offer them an offer to re-engage them with our app or rewards them for being a loyal customer.

With the help of analytics, we can analyze which customer is engaging with notification or which one is not engaging.

Once identified, so you can send notifications to those customers who engage with notifications.

ii) Cloud Messaging

Firebase Cloud Messaging older name is Google Cloud Messaging. Firebase Cloud Messaging is a multi-platform solution for Notifications and Messages for iOS, Android, and web apps.

From 2016, you can use this service free of cost otherwise you had to sacrifice your one t-shirt a month.

iii) In-App Messaging

So you created an app for the user, but how do you communicate with users?

With a puppy?

With the help of the tool, you can send a personalized message to your users to increase session time, conversation and ultimately, in the end, it helps you to grow your revenue.

The best part?

You can easily create a marketing campaign as well.

iv) Remote Config

With the help of the Remote Config feature, we can easily change the appearance and behavior of our app.

It’s a simple key-value that stored in the cloud. You can easily change the text in the cloud through Firebase Console and update the app.

For instance, if your app is a game and people are complaining that level 9 is very tough, so you can decide to decrease the difficulty level.

But here comes a problem?

What if silent people majority loved that hard difficulty level 9? If you try to decrease the difficulty level, you can lose your users?

How can you find that this change is good or bad?

Well here comes A/B Testing and you can use the “audience segmentation” feature.

This feature allows you to deliver different configurations to different groups of users simultaneously.

v) A/B Testing

With A/B testing, you can change the placement of a button, text view and send notifications, etc.

And can check which performs the best as per your decisions. You can target a group of people to test the feature and can make your app better without being worried.

Moreover, Firebase A/B Testing runs on the top of remote config, cloud messaging, analytics to test and measure everything.

Dynamic Links are also called smart URLs because they changed their behavior dynamically in order to provide the best user experience.

It works on all kinds of apps.

If the user clicks on any dynamic link and the user does not have that app then it will automatically be prompted to install the app.

Then after installing the app, the user can access that link.

vii) AdMob

You can earn money with your app using AdMob. AdMob makes easy for you to earn money from your app with high-quality ads.

High quality? It means Google identity the needs of the users as per his browsing history and shows ads to generate revenue for you and Google itself.

It’s good for a new developer who doesn’t have any money to grow the business, but the money earned from AdMob can motivate him.

4. Analytics

With Analytics, you can get data of:

Demographic : Information like who your user is.

: Information like who your user is. Retention Rate: How regularly they use your app

How regularly they use your app Engagement: How much time they spent on your app

How much time they spent on your app Average Revenue: How much money they spent on your app

Moreover, you can also get detailed information like logging events like when user add an item to your cart, and users took a selfie in a photo app, etc.

5. Extensions

Your time is valuable and you have to build and ship your app quickly.

Even a basic functionality of an app takes time to build, test, debug and deploy.

To solve the problem, Firebase Extensions speed up the process.

What are they?

Firebase Extensions are the prepackaged solutions and provide extended functionality to the app like an extension that resizes your image and uploads to cloud storage.

It means all images are optimized and responsive and can work across different devices.

You can see different extensions from here.

We’ve said enough what Firebase can do for your app. Have a question? Ask!