I Don't Use Firebase Anymore. Here's Why.

hey guys welcome back to a new video in this video i'm going to talk about why i don't suggest to use firebase for your app first of all i understand why firebase is so popular among developers i don't know why it's so popular specifically among mobile developers because you can also use it for web or ios but i feel like it's very popular among android developers in general of course i fully understand it it's very simple you don't need your own backend and you don't need to worry about any type of scaling because firebase does all that for you and also with whatever i talk about in this video here i only mean yeah the the more back end like features of firebase so that means real-time database firestore authentication and maybe storage so that is what my criticism goes to here and not so much like analytics crashlytics fcm those are things that are really helpful and that i also use with firebase but not so much these database authentication and storage mechanisms so let's get straight to the point what is the big drawback that i see in firebase that is that you give away all your control to google to firebase because suddenly if you use firebase as your back end you you depend on the functionality that google gives you and in my experience very very very often at a later point it turned out that firebase does not offer something you really need in your project and then you have to make compromises that you actually don't want to make let me give you some examples for example searching in a list of documents in your firestore database let's say you have a list of users a collection of users and you want to search for lists of users by their name that's not possible with firebase there is no query that that you can use to check if a given field contains a specific string and i think searching for some documents is actually something you need in very many apps then something i encountered in the past querying an array with more than 10 entries that is something you might wonder okay why would i need that and yeah there is no specific example i can give you right now but there are a lot of these small things that you don't actually plan with because you just don't know about that but then at a later point you encounter these and you realize oh i can't even do that with firebase and you you didn't consider that in your planning that that isn't actually possible and in general it's just that very limited query potential you have with firestore and real-time database so that when you plan even if you plan really well and you think of all your queries that you need and really make sure those are possible with firebase that's that's rarely going to be the final version of your app you know how it is your app will change your requirements will change in future and so will your queries and it's likely that at some point you will realize okay i have some kind of query here a database query that that i can't use with firebase that firebase just doesn't offer and then you stand there with a project that already has like a 20k lines of code and you realize okay this feature isn't really possible or only with a huge workaround that i don't really want to use so far for the control part i criticize here the other big point of critique is the pricing firebase becomes extremely expensive when your app actually grows and you don't realize that when you actually just start to to play with it when you still have the free version and everything is good but as your app grows it can become so much more expensive than you ever thought of and that even if you do everything right imagine you you have some smaller mistakes in your app so for example you don't fully optimize your queries and you just have some manual bugs in your app or coding mistakes then these smaller mistakes can can snowball and make it so expensive for you because you just might make more queries than you actually need and that can really cost you a fortune so you might ask what do you actually do philip i write my own backend so that is what i actually want to recommend you as android developers at least for those who actually are able to write some some working android apps among you for you i really recommend learning how to build a simple back-end you don't need to become a master bag and developer but just understanding that on a general level that you're able to write simple apis for your apps it's a huge advantage because you'll never really have to make any compromises again because with your own backend pretty much everything is possible so you can choose your database you can choose your server configuration you can choose the programming language you can choose all of that that you can't do with firebase now of course back-end development and learning that is takes a bit more time than learning firebase i agree with that and it also requires a little bit more time to actually write your own back-end than just to bump in the the firebase libraries and use them but it's it's a really good investment of your time to actually learn background development as an android developer however if you just started mobile development then please forget everything i said here because then you should focus on learning the basics of android first learn how you can make some first simple apps and for that using firebase is fully fine because it just helps you to have a back end without actually putting the focus on building a backend and it just helps you to build functioning android apps but if you're already a little bit more advanced android developer and you know how to build some simple apps then i really recommend you learn back on development and get a little away from firebase it it'll really pay off in the long term no matter if you're a freelancer if you're looking for a job if you if you do whatever as an android developer it will always be quite helpful to understand how backends work if you need my help with that and you want to learn how you can make your own kotlin back and with kator then you can check the links down below which will lead you to my cater courses and this will help you to to learn that back and stuff from scratch so you can make your very own back-ends for your future android projects and if you say okay philip i i think your courses are great but i don't feel like paying for that at the moment then you can also check below there is a link you can subscribe to my free email newsletter and that way you will also gain more information about android about kotlin about architecture about backend just for free in your inbox so it doesn't cost you anything so you can just check down below and subscribe to that newsletter i would love to know your opinion about firebase here in the comments let's have a little discussion and just let me know if you have used that in the past if you encountered similar issues as i did yeah so just put your experience in the comments would be great to to just talk a little bit and apart from that i wish an excellent day see you next video again bye bye

Channel: Philipp Lackner

Views: 11,016

Keywords: android, tutorial, philip, philipp, filipp, filip, fillip, fillipp, phillipp, phillip, lackener, leckener, leckner, lackner, kotlin, mobile

Id: jLtyV8ujYDE

Length: 6min 46sec (406 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 08 2021