Fast and real-time updates, push-notifications support, easy setup, Robust APIs for JavaScript (including several frameworks), iOS & Android support, built-in auto-scaling, cross-platform API, free tier up to 100 simultaneous connections, and more are the benefits of firebase.
Knowing that it’s a great way to get your app run easily and quickly without any doubt, just like any other backend service, ignoring the fact as it does have some limitations also which cannot be slip upon. It’s an excessive force if your app runs only on one centralized database and a number of users are updating it. Before looking at the downside of firebase read about Effective firebase alternatives.
What are the downsides of Firebase?
Talking about the vendor lock-in, one of its biggest and most obvious concerns is, which helps you to prevent making your app portable. Other than this as your data is hosted by a firebase server, you cannot access your data. It dragon into a customer to continue using products from the particular vendor as there is a lack of compatibility between different systems. It has some following disadvantages i.e:
- According to your app need you cannot optimize your backend
- To shop around and the power to negotiate you’ll lose the ability
- The new technologies that are used by other vendors, you’ll not be aware of it
Considering the nature of these updates, you can’t customize your app on server levels as you considering the nature of these updates, you’ll be always looked at by the Google update. Form a tree-shaped structure, which can be hard to search and navigate hence is another downside of firebase is its data which can be easily unorganized. Also, there are high chances of data loss. Also always remember, all your data can gone in just two or three inexact clicks. Also, the data validation, so there is no need to validate individual successor nodes separately so that it will not support complex objects directly.
So at last, you can easily get an open-source alternative which means a more complete backend solution that not only provides you much more control over your data and not only works like firebase. Always go for the technology that you’re used to of working with it.
