Why is Firebase the best Mobile Backend-as-a-Service

In today’s day and age words like ‘mobile application’ and ‘cloud’ are creating quite a stir. Each day there is some new application in the market with the aim of delivering the best performance to their users. Mobile backend services help achieve this by building a better infrastructure.

What is BaaS?
These days most mobile applications need a backend that’s connected to the internet. BaaS (Backend-as-a-Service) is the service that helps enable that, helping you manage the centralized database and allowing your users to share content via the cloud. BaaS provides the backend for mobile applications, an API, and tools for various programming languages to integrate with their application backend. As opposed to SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) that is targeted to end users, BaaS is targeted at developers.

Also scaling apps is difficult as and when your audience grows, to do this effectively, you need a backend. Earlier backends needed to be developed from scratch but owing to technological advancements, you can now directly integrate them into your application. In this post, we’ll be exploring various backend service platforms and how to choose the best amongst them.

Types of BaaS for Mobile Apps
There are two types of Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) namely Consumer BaaS and Enterprise BaaS.

Consumer BaaS: This focuses more on lightweight applications and games.

Enterprise BaaS: This focuses more on mobilizing sensitive and critical business data.

When it comes to different BaaS services, there are several leading solutions like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kinvey, Google Firebase and Apple CloudKit.

Why Firebase?
Firebase was an independent service before being acquired and launched by Google as a part of 2016 UI. Firebase aims to help web developers in building better apps and thereby helping them grow in their business, by taking care of the backend of the applications. Here are some features that help in determining why Firebase is the best BaaS available:.

1. Platform: Firebase provides a real-time database platform that writes events as and when it occurs. It also provides database management API.
2. Front-End: Firebase runs on Angular, Ember, Vue.js and React on the front end.
3. Hosting: It includes features like custom domains for free, Global CDN, Users, DB and Auto-provisioned SSL certificates.
4. Clean Dashboard: A strong design is another feature of Firebase, the dashboard is clean and lists all the features on the left sidebar.
5. Analytics: Firebase has a free and built-in Analytics for all Firebase apps, which allows developers to see how ad campaigns are performing, log events to track username and age, view active users in your application etc.

Pros and Cons of Firebase

Pros	Cons
Requires minimal setup and easy access to data, files and more.	Firebase is neither open source nor can you host your data.
It is real time having a robust API and provides user side high security.	As Firebase uses JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) and a NoSQL database and hence the format for storing is entirely different to that of SQL.
Requires no server-side infrastructure to power apps with data.	Has very limited indexing and developers need to build the indexes manually.

Conclusion              

With features like Cloud Messaging, Remote Config, and a Real-Time Database, Firebase scores points. Choosing the right BaaS is crucial and it comes down to what your project requires. Go through features of all the available services, features and platforms before deciding which you wish to use.