Firebase feeds directly into two huge businesses that Google cares deeply about: Cloud and Ads. I can't predict the distant future, but unless Google's core business shifts drastically Firebase isn't going anywhere.
If experience has taught us anything, it's that it's pretty naive to say this about anything owned by Google. I mean, things like Google Wave and Google Buzz were huge initiatives at one point too.
We will never be able to fully dispell these worries, but I think there's pretty strong evidence in support of Firebase's prospects. Our developers will have to judge if the value we deliver is higher than the small-but-non-zero chance of it going away.
I certainly think it is, but I'm pretty biased. :)
It's absolutely possible I'm being naive here - just one person's take on the situation.
In the case of Google Wave, this was an experimental new way of communicating. I remember it being cool and exciting at the time, but I definitely didn't get the impression it was a commercial product. And afterwards they ended up open-sourcing the whole thing as an Apache project.
Google Buzz was a little less experimental, but as another poster mentioned, it was a free consumer product and second it ended up being superseded by Google+.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discon...
Never say never. You just don't know when another team comes out with a slicker implementation and makes that part of the cloud offering. That being said, I find the firebase part of the current cloud offering to not be as slick as the other offerings. For example, for me to use push notifications, I have to use Firebase. It should be it's own standalone service like Amazon SNS.
FireBase's analytics are very strong though, would be on top of list if I wanted to do something outside GraphQL again.
Regarding the ability to "switch away": https://www.graph.cool/docs/faq/graphcool-moving-projects-aw...
Yeah, I heard the same about Parse.