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Comment by russellbeattie | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why Google is reusing the Firebase brand so much? It doesn't really fit with messaging (GCM -> FCM) or links, among other functions. Seems like an odd choice, even if the backend infrastructure/team is the same.

Reminds me of Microsoft reusing "Surface", or prepending "Live" to everything once upon a time...

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Firebase is their Mobile-Backend-as-a-Service brand.

The product they're driving customers to, Firebase Dynamic Links, is not really a web URL shortener, but more of a bridge between URLs and in-app links. In this light, it makes sense.

I thought it was their repo of entities that was used for displaying Google Knowledge results? Or the ecommerce product repo...

or am i thinking of totally different things? I feel like there are other google products that end with “Base”

That was Freebase, which was acquired by Google for use in their Knowledge Graph.

This is to woo developers from both platforms especially iOS devs.

A Google branding is closely associated with Android.

As someone who is a heavy Firebase user and a huge fan, it reassures me that Google has so much confidence in the Firebase platform. When you think about it, Firebase is just a friendly wrapper around Google Cloud, pretty much every Firebase feature is just UI sugar over Google Cloud Functions, Google Cloud Hosting and so on.

While Google pushes its mobile functionality and features first and foremost, Firebase is an invaluable web platform for both native and web, sans a couple of features like Remote Config.

I think Firebase is one of the best things to happen to my development workflow in a long time, invaluable for things like MVP's, etc.

I don't know about the "messaging" one... of the big use cases for Firebase was just to send push notifications for numerous channels, and the tech came literally from usage in a chat system (then called Envolve). I haven't looked at this new URL shortener thing yet, though.

Probably because there is one Firebase team and one Google Cloud Other Stuff team and the teams just make different things.

They use it internally

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