Solving Common Challenges of App Development with Firebase

It seems like there’s an app for everything these days. But developing these apps is not that easy, it's challenging sometimes.

Common Challenges while Developing mobile (iOS / Android) or Web Apps

• Managing the back-end and scaling it
• Managing the infrastructure for functionality like analytics, databases, messaging and crash reporting
• Creating an on-boarding flow for new users and monitor the on-boarding process and find ways to improve it
• Optimizing the app experience through experimentation ( A / B Testing)

What is Firebase?

Firebase is a comprehensive app development platform which helps mobile and web app teams succeed

In other words,

Firebase is a tool / platform which solves all the common mobile or web App Development challenges

Firebase provides a suite of tools for authentication, database, analytics, monitoring etc. It provides back-end management for web, iOS, Android Apps. It also works as a host of other helpful resources for managing apps in general.

It is packaged with features that help developers like ourselves focus on building apps while it handles all server-side logic.

How does it solve all the common challenges?

Developers can build better apps, improve app quality and grow the business easily with the help of Firebase.

1. Firebase lets you build more powerful, secure and scalable apps, using world-class infrastructure.

Some of the tools / products (from Firebase suite of tools) for these use cases:

• Cloud Firestore: Store and sync data between users and devices - at global scale - using a cloud-hosted, NoSQL database.
• Authentication: Manage your users in a simple and secure way. Firebase Auth offers multiple methods to authenticate, including email and password, third-party providers like Google or Facebook, and using your existing account system directly.
• Realtime Database: It's an efficient, low-latency solution for mobile apps that require synced states across clients in realtime.
• Hosting: Simplify your web hosting with tools made specifically for modern web apps. When you upload your web assets, it automatically pushes them out to its global CDN and give them a free SSL certificate so your users get a secure, reliable, low-latency experience, no matter where they are.

2. Firebase gives you insights into app performance and stability, so you can channel your resources effectively.

Some of the tools / products for these use cases:

• Crashlytics: Reduce your troubleshooting time by turning an avalanche of crashes into a manageable list of issues. Get clear, actionable insight into which issues to tackle first by seeing the user impact right in the Crashlytics dashboard.
• Performance Monitoring: Diagnose app performance issues occurring on your users’ devices. Use traces to monitor the performance of specific parts of your app and see a summarized view in the Firebase console. Stay on top of your app’s start-up time and monitor HTTP requests without writing any code.

3. It helps you grow to millions of users, simplifying user engagement and retention.

Some of the tools / products for these use cases:

• Google Analytics: Analyze user attributions and behavior in a single dashboard to make informed decisions on your product roadmap. Gain realtime insights from reports, or export your raw event data to Google BigQuery for custom analysis.
• Cloud Messaging: Send messages and notifications to users across platforms—Android, iOS, and the web—for free. Messages can be sent to single devices, groups of devices, or specific topics or user segments.
• A/B Testing: Improve your app by running product and marketing experiments, without worrying about setting up the infrastructure to run A/B tests. Customize experiments to suit your goals.

You can explore more about Firebase here: https://firebase.google.com/