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Open sourcing the Firebase SDKs
- depoll 9y agoI was an early Parse engineer (4th engineer to join the company) and now am the SDK engineering lead for Firebase. The experience of working on Firebase at Google is vastly different from Parse at Facebook, and it shows in Google’s continued commitment to building and expanding Firebase, integrating it with its Cloud Platform products, and otherwise pouring huge amounts of effort into making Firebase great for developers. Open sourcing our SDKs gives us even more ways to engage with the developer community and allows us to be more transparent with the progress we’re making. This announcement is just a first step down the path toward more transparency with our SDKs, but we hope to foster community and build trust in the tools we’re developing, and welcome your contributions!
- salimmadjd 9y agoThat's great! But it does make sense why google and FB would be taking different paths here. As much as I was disappointed with FB's decision on Parse, I can also understand the reasoning behind it and I actually think it was the right decisions for the company. In contrast, Google is playing in the cloud service vertical and investing in the future of Firebase is totally aligned with that objective.
- daxfohl 9y agoThough it does seem kind of odd that facebook isn't playing in that space. I'd be curious to know their reasoning for not launching a competing product there.
- dirtylowprofile 9y agoI'm just wondering if there is a feature on your future pipeline to include username as a sign up/sign in your SDKs besides only email and password?
- salqadri 9y agoFirebase actually announced phone number authentication on Wednesday as yet another alternative to only having email/pw.
- gigatexal 9y agowhat's new? Bug fix that increases costs by a huge amount. It's a feature not a bug ;-)
- kyrra 9y agoThere have been some updates on this situation for those that caught it earlier today. Original post has been updated about being contacted by Firebase: https://medium.com/@contact_16315/firebase-costs-increased-by-7-000-81dc0a27271d https://medium.com/@contact_16315/firebase-costs-increased-b... Firebase founder comment on Medium about it: https://medium.com/@startupandrew/firebase-founder-here-im-very-sorry-for-the-surprise-and-frustration-experienced-by-the-poster-b0065c99f53e https://medium.com/@startupandrew/firebase-founder-here-im-v... (and he posted the same thing on the HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14359801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14359801 ) (I work at G, opinions are my own).
- gigatexal 9y agoI was being needlessly trolly but glad there's some dialog happening. And I'm sure this will get worked out.
- yeldarb 9y agoHow about open sourcing the realtime database server? Would love to be able to do offline local development.
- HodGreeley 9y agoWith Couchbase Mobile, we shy away from the "realtime" claim, because it's vague. (Ask a high-frequency trader how they define realtime...) Having said that, we have customers that are very happy with the response times. Always been open-source. Check our blogs for steps to get everything set up front to back to develop on one machine.
- themihai 9y agoI didn't even know that the client was not open source. What makes this Firebase less risky than Parse or the recently deprecated Prediction API?
- salqadri 9y agoSee the reply above by depoll: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14362877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14362877
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- PanosJee 9y agoNot any news on the Fabric dismantle. What brand stays alive? Will everything become Firebase?
- phpencil 9y agoThere is a bit! Digits is moving to Firebase Auth, and Crashlytics will be the primary crash reporter for Firebase.
- jamest 9y agoThere was a couple of pieces of news: 1. We're merging Digits into Firebase Authentiation 2. In the future, Crashlytics will be replacing Firebase Crash Reporting to become the default crash reporting tool in Firebase. Hopefully this gives an idea of where we're going.
- jamest 9y ago[other Firebase founder] It was painful to read the article[1] this morning, especially since I was one of the people responsible for dropping the ball on getting Home Automation the credit to cover the overage a few weeks ago. We're working with the founder to make sure he's in a better spot. If you have similarly serious issues, my email is: james@firebase.com To address a couple of points that have been raised: 1. We're aware that as we've integrated with Google our support response time & quality has decreased. I'm working with our team to do better. 2. We know better querying and web offline are needed for the Realtime Database, stay tuned. Finally, I hope you enjoy all the new features that launched today! (https://firebase.googleblog.com/2017/05/whats-new-from-firebase-at-google-io.html https://firebase.googleblog.com/2017/05/whats-new-from-fireb...) Leave a comment if you have thoughts/comments. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14356409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14356409
- hackerboos 9y agoUntil this[1] is fixed I'm not sure that Firebase would meet my needs for many projects. It's such a fundamental requirement to be able to query multiple fields without creating a mess of permutations of each field. [1] - https://youtu.be/sKFLI5FOOHs?t=541 https://youtu.be/sKFLI5FOOHs?t=541
- Top19 9y agoTo my discredit I enjoyed dumping on Google earlier today with the Firebase support issue article. That being said this was a great response and I appreciate it. Also my first React Native app used Firebase and I have fond memories of setting that up :) I like that item #1 was very direct...essentially: "look the support got worse and it's not good but we're working on it". SIDE NOTE: I don't get how a lot of people today don't understand that using vague language in apologies doesn't help with apologies. It definitely used to, but then everyone started doing it, and now the cool / rare thing to do is to be direct. Maybe the pendulum will swing back someday. Until then thank you Mr.Google/Firebase/James person.
- josephg 9y agoI enjoyed dumping on Google earlier too. I love firebase, but I've talked two companies I've worked with out of using it for new, mission critical projects. The earlier article made me feel completely vindicated in my recommendations. I simply have no trust that: - Google won't randomly cancel firebase (wave, reader, etc) - Google won't randomly, suddenly jack up the prices for firebase, leaving users in the lurch (appengine) - When something mission critical breaks or changes, I'll have any way of contacting someone who cares, no matter how much my company is paying for the service. (Google's support forums are a pit of sorrow) I was reading an article the other day talking about personhood[1]. It makes the point that part of being a member of society is the idea of standing. That is, if you break your word there has to be a way for you to lose out as a result. If there isn't, its impossible for anyone to enter into an agreement with you because you can't be trusted. Forming an agreement requires both sides to have skin in the game. I don't genuinely believe that google has skin in the game when it comes to cloud services for small-to-medium customers. Its just too easy for them to drop the ball, stop answering emails and leave customers in the lurch. They've done it again and again. I'd say its the default way Google operates. Thomas Schelling from The Strategy of Conflict: > Among the legal privileges of corporations, two that are mentioned in textbooks are the right to sue and the "right" to be sued. Who wants to be sued! But the right to be sued is the power to make a promise: to borrow money, to enter a contract, to do business with someone who might be damaged. If suit does arise, the "right" seems a liability in retrospect; beforehand it was a prerequisite to doing business. Please, firebase. Please be different. But know that thats the reputation you're fighting against. Thats the reputation you've inherited by joining Google. But for now I'm standing by my earlier recommendations. [1] http://www.meltingasphalt.com/personhood-a-game-for-two-or-more-players/ http://www.meltingasphalt.com/personhood-a-game-for-two-or-m...
- vassy 9y agoI can see there's no Ruby SDK, but are there any plans to build one?
- akanet 9y agoI help maintain the unofficial Ruby client for interfacing with the Firebase Database REST API: https://github.com/oscardelben/firebase-ruby https://github.com/oscardelben/firebase-ruby I use it on my fairly high-traffic Firebase site and it works well.
- theprop 9y agoThis means that I can host my own Firebase-built web application myself? It'll be just as fast as if it ran on Google's infrastructure (assuming machines are the same)? Is this kind of an insinuation that Google plans to drop Firebase soon and leave it to the open source community to take care of? What are Firebase's revenues like?
- marknadal 9y agoWow, this is exactly what I was predicting in my comment on the other thread ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14359479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14359479 ). James is solid, great job team!
- Brahma111 9y agoThis post shows, how mis-informed the community can be. If you have been following up Google Cloud and Firebase, most of the questions regarding long term support, phasing out and Google turning rogue wouldn't be asked. Firebase is one key aspect of Google's cloud strategy. Pretty much everything on Mobile services is tied with Firebase, some way or the other. We have now built 2 products on Firebase and are reasonably happy. The real-time nature of FB makes it alluring to so many use cases. Having said that, Google should surely address questions on pricing and supporting other key Mobile platforms like Xamarin. Tweeting to the Firebase handle on issues never get replied. With other bleeding edge services that Google provides, Firebase certainly has positioned itself nice. The teething issues should be small things to fix.
- bad_user 9y ago> Tweeting to the Firebase handle on issues never get replied. Is that really how you expect to get support?
- flukus 9y agoSadly it's often the most effective way. Companies pay a lot for social media monitoring and anything that gets a lot of tweets they'll act on.
- bad_user 9y agoWell obviously some companies disagree. Interactions on Twitter are shallow, which makes support interactions risky and unsatisfactory for the customer ;-) Which is why any sane company will only reply "Please mail us at ...".
- Piskvorrr 9y ago"...at blackhole@example.com", usually.
- jamest 9y agoYes, we don't reply on Twitter since it became difficult to operate across multiple channels as we scaled. I've just updated our Twitter bio to make it clear where to go for support: http://twitter.com/firebase http://twitter.com/firebase
- mariogintili 9y agolol funny how there was an article on the top news talking about Firebase's crazy pricing and now this. Great way to clean a mess Google!