My recollection is that progress on Firebase stopped when Google bought it, and I haven't followed it for almost a decade. Does anyone know if these basic features were ever added?

1) It used to download the whole state (write history) upon startup. Did they ever update it to send a snapshot, or a partial view of the data with lazy-loading for additional nodes?

2) Did they ever provide a simple push notification service? That was pretty much the only thing missing to be able to run Firebase without another server.

3) Were node aliases/shortcuts ever implemented, so a node could be a reference to another node? That would have greatly reduced the need for a SQL JOIN alternative.

Also, after having done some cloud dev ops work, I can't endorse it from any provider at this time, as the burden of securing things like user permissions is beyond what humans are generally capable of, so I consider them an anti-pattern. A better pattern is token-based authentication for everything, using standard web metaphors and REST APIs, so that every service behaves like a sandboxed root user with limited abilities granted. I also wouldn't use any cloud service without Terraform or a similar declarative infrastructure manager. Meaning that the best cloud service is basically the best Terraform configuration, providing a higher level of abstraction like Heroku, which largely defeats the purpose of direct cloud hosting in the first place.

So.. the cloud is no substitute for Firebase, and if it goes that route, it will be no surprise if customers jump ship.