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Firebase is pretty simple to use, and possibly because of this, I've seen quite a few terrible implementations. I think it attracts people who only know app dev

Firebase is pretty simple to use, and possibly because of this, I've seen quite a few terrible implementations. I think it attracts people who only know app development, where security, scalability, authentication, etc, are not really a concern because you have exactly one user on one device. It's easy to accidentally make a bunch of information world-readable, and if a malicious user gets hold of the right details they can simply read all your content out, or even start writing bad content in, racking up a bill in the process. Whether this is what happened here or not I have no idea. And I don't think this is even really a problem with Firebase, just an indicator of the sort of developer who ends up using Firebase and their background.

mrtksn 2y ago
It's simple to start but quite hard to master actually. It has plenty of counterintuitive concepts that even an experienced developer can get wrong and result in ruinous expenses or catastrophic security issues. Especially on Firestore. For example, the access rules that you define on your properties are not filters(they are rules on what you can ask the system to do) even if they look like filters at first glance and the way it accessing data is billed is based on what has had to be processed to return the results and not on what the actual results were returned. This makes it very easy to create very expensive and compromised apps if you slip. Also, unlike more traditional system, doesn't produce smoke so it passes all the smell tests and you learn about your mistakes once things go very bad.