> you could just have easily have achieved the same result by just using plain Socket.io or a similar library Is this an easier problem than I think it is? Is

> you could just have easily have achieved the same result by just using plain Socket.io or a similar library Is this an easier problem than I think it is? Is there a well known path for scaling socket connections and synchronizing data across clients? I suspect most cases where devs talk about a messaging problem, it's really a data synchronization problem. I'm starting to suspect the sweet spot for Firebase in a large application is as a cache and communication mechanism rather than the primary datastore. Is that along the lines of what you're seeing? Firebase has a few subtleties, but its API footprint is small for a datastore. How much sympathy do we need to have for people that use a tool without reading the docs first? "free them from having to manage a backend" For a certain class of mobile apps it does. If we want the marketing material to apply to every customer, what PaaS or SaaS company will be left standing?