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Comment by jondubois | Hacker News Reader

Based on my experience with Firebase, it doesn't reduce complexity; it just shifts it around and adds extra costs (both financial and performance costs) to your system.

For any serious app, you still need to have a backend server on the side and your Firebase service often becomes bloated and inefficient. Sometimes you want to store the Firebase data inside your main DB as well and so you end up with two sources of truth and Firebase ends up becoming a third wheel to your project (just a bloated data transport layer).

It's not surprising that Firebase has been sliding in terms of popularity: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/firebase.com

It's good for rapid prototyping/MVC but not for any serious use case.

I think the big lesson in the framework/devtools space is that the more opinionated the tooling is, the less flexible it becomes and the fewer use cases it covers.

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That Alexa rank drop for firebase.com is because they switched from firebase.com to firebase.google.com, not because there is a decrease in interest. The latter is the first result when you search: https://www.google.com/#q=firebase

Also, searches for firebase have increased, which indicates more interest: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%2012-m&q=fi...

I don't know if the Alexa.com ranking of Firebase.com is really indicative of popularity due to the fact they moved their main site to https://firebase.google.com/ about the time of the sharp decline indicated.

The approach Firebase takes can be summarized as, "make the 90% use cases simple, and make the complicated 10% possible." Tradeoffs are a core engineering concept, so I think this comes as no surprise to seasoned engineers (the more cynical ones often phrase the question as "what's the catch"). By partnering with Google Cloud Platform, we're working to make the complicated 10% much easier (tradeoff here is lower cost/greater control vs having to be more hands on with your infrastructure).

A great example of this is [Firebase Storage](https://firebase.google.com/docs/storage/). We've made the 90% of file upload/download use cases easy, while making the 10% of use cases (lifecycle management, object versioning, advanced processing) [accessible through Cloud](https://firebase.google.com/docs/storage/gcp-integration). Stay tuned for more, similar integrations in the future :)

As for the financial costs--you're paying someone else to build and manage your infrastructure, so yes, it will cost more than buying raw infra. Again, this is a tradeoff: is this more valuable to your product/users to answer pages or build features? Depending on where you are in your product lifecycle, YMMV.

(Disclosure: I work on Firebase)

> As for the financial costs--you're paying someone else to build and manage your infrastructure, so yes, it will cost more than buying raw infra. Again, this is a tradeoff: is this more valuable to your product/users to answer pages or build features? Depending on where you are in your product lifecycle, YMMV

First, 2-3 orders of magnitude more expensive is quite a steep price to pay for the featureset of Firebase.

Second, it’s only a good idea to use Firebase if you don’t plan on ever migrating away – because that will be hell.

And third, Firebase is a massive engineering effort, and I’m surprised that stuff actually works, considering how much work it is to try and replicate the features I need myself.

On the other hand, somehow I feel like Firebase is just an example of the hell we live in, one of the greatest development tools, and all of it is secret, most not even patented, never will be open or free, and just being used to force developers into a closed ecosystem of Google’s Cloud.

It’d be a lot nicer place if projects like this would be open, so people could use it on their own systems (because I certainly won’t trust a company running systems in a country ruled by Trump).

> It’d be a lot nicer place if projects like this would be open, so people could use it on their own systems

Check Feathers.js if you want realtime on your own system.

I have, sadly it doesn’t really scale well enough.

I work on Quasseldroid, an android client for the quassel IRC bouncer, and the idea is that you can always access all messages instantly, while the client only buffers a few of them.

This works quite well, and is easy to do with Feathers.js and others, even Firebase...

...if there wasn’t the issue that the average user is in hundreds of channels and gets tenthousands of messages per hour, in some cases, even thousands of messages a second (if the user is in a channel with > 10k other users, for example, and everyone is chatting – such as during eurovision on Quakenet’s #eurovision).

Although users self-host, so we don’t have infrastructure costs, they usually do so on a raspberry pi – and Feathers.js can’t easily handle thousands of changes per minute to its database while running on a raspberry pi, and accurately sync them to multiple clients.

Oh wow.

So how did you/are you solving this?

Well, while I only work on the Android client, the solution currently in use is a large codebase of code specifically written for this single purpose. In C++. Compiled natively. That’s the main reason why good performance with the system is even possible.

A huge performance boost (reconnection times down from ~2 minutes to ~12 seconds on 64kbps 2G network, using a Nexus 5X) could be accomplished by using Java NIO with non-copying IO for parsing the custom binary protocol, but we’re looking into using flat protobufs for improving performance further.

But then the database layer becomes the bottleneck. SQLite is far too slow to be normally usable, most users use PostgreSQL for the backing database.

Basically, the trick is in "don’t use JSON and JS, do stuff with native code and binary protocols to reduce overhead".

But this makes maintenance basically impossible, and isn’t really ideal either.

DISCLAIMER: I do not speak for the Quassel project, all opinions represented here are solely my own.

Another option to check out is Couchbase Mobile. Open source, self-hosted database with full offline functionality and a solid sync solution.

I think Firebase is pretty amazing. Have been a fan since I met some of the team (I think it was at the 2011 Launch conference). Like anything, though, there are tradeoffs.

Briefly, I'd say that there's overlap, with Couchbase Mobile tending to shine toward the more complex end (including making the 10% much easier), and also being extremely easy to use as a substitute for SQLite/Core.

(I work for Couchbase.)

> All data is stored and transmitted as JSON – the embedded database, the database server, REST APIs, stream APIs, and batch APIs.

That’s likely going to become an issue with my usecase – even currently while using a custom binary format on the net, and decoding with Java NIO, we’re seeing ~80-90% CPU utilization on latest Android phones for ~4-5 seconds during connection to sync the latest tenthousands to hundredthousands of messages.

I doubt using Strings, and specifically JSON, will make that more performant.

(But I’ll definitely look into your code as inspiration for how to continue)

> make the 90% use cases simple, and make the complicated 10% possible

That's not what we have experienced while using Firebase for the last year.

I have no complaints about storage, but the database is so limited that most projects will become impractical or simply impossible for a number of reasons:

1) No remotely decent querying capabilities

2) No search capabilities other than building your own or relying on third party like Elastic

3) No way to reference data, make joins, etc, like Rethink, Mongo, Arango, or others have.

I'd say the vast majority of projects will need one or more of those points which really doesn't fit into your statement.

Completely disagree. We started using Firebase; compared to using websockets with e.g Pusher its much, much simpler, primarily because it's a store of state as well as a real time stream. It also handles going off-line and then syncing whilst coming back online perfectly and without any additional code.

Yes of course you need a server for most apps, but I don't see a problem with that. Yes, your app might have data in two places, but it's still the simplest way to build a real-time app. My biz has done it several times and the smallest, simplest code base has been with Firebase. Far fewer moving parts too.

Sorry, just to add it's WAY cheaper than part-way solutions like Pusher.

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