[mbleigh]

Firebase engineer here. We recognize the anxiety that comes with a hosted solution. That being said, Firebase has seen enormous and growing investment from Google (see e.g. Fabric acquisition).

Firebase feeds directly into two huge businesses that Google cares deeply about: Cloud and Ads. I can't predict the distant future, but unless Google's core business shifts drastically Firebase isn't going anywhere.

[enraged_camel]

>>Firebase isn't going anywhere.

If experience has taught us anything, it's that it's pretty naive to say this about anything owned by Google. I mean, things like Google Wave and Google Buzz were huge initiatives at one point too.

[mbleigh]

Is it possible things will change? Of course. I was just trying to illustrate that, unlike Parse and Facebook, Firebase has a clear relationship with core Google businesses.

We will never be able to fully dispell these worries, but I think there's pretty strong evidence in support of Firebase's prospects. Our developers will have to judge if the value we deliver is higher than the small-but-non-zero chance of it going away.

I certainly think it is, but I'm pretty biased. :)

[kaishiro]

So, I see this argument over and over again with re: to Google, but what I've never seen is Google closing shop on anything in their GCE offering. This certainly doesn't mean it's not possible, but I'm not sure comparing the discontinuation of one-off products to any of the GCE offerings is fair.

It's absolutely possible I'm being naive here - just one person's take on the situation.

[victorhooi]

The two examples you have aren't really comparable.

In the case of Google Wave, this was an experimental new way of communicating. I remember it being cool and exciting at the time, but I definitely didn't get the impression it was a commercial product. And afterwards they ended up open-sourcing the whole thing as an Apache project.

Google Buzz was a little less experimental, but as another poster mentioned, it was a free consumer product and second it ended up being superseded by Google+.

[CobrastanJorji]

Most of the canceled Google products have been free, consumer-facing, chat apps. Have they canceled any cloud products? App Engine's been around for like a decade now.

[amorphid]

Could Google/Firebase commit to open sourcing the code, and making sure everyone (who wants to) can seamlessly transition off Firebase, if the product is to be euthanized? If there was a transition contingency for anyone who depends on Firebase, that'd make depending on Firebase less worrisome.

[electic]

This looks really really bad. Take a look at this list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discon...

Never say never. You just don't know when another team comes out with a slicker implementation and makes that part of the cloud offering. That being said, I find the firebase part of the current cloud offering to not be as slick as the other offerings. For example, for me to use push notifications, I have to use Firebase. It should be it's own standalone service like Amazon SNS.

[blaisio]

FCM is a standalone service, it's just branded with Firebase instead of Google like before.

[tomByrer]

While I feel better when Google acquired FB, I still would like the ability to switch away from FireBase (costs, China firewall, etc). I couldn't find something like a 'database abstraction layer' I had with SQL. Thought about writing a store-FireBase interface, then I discovered GraphQL & GraphQL cloud dbs....

FireBase's analytics are very strong though, would be on top of list if I wanted to do something outside GraphQL again.

[schickling]

Hi Tom! We really like how easy it is to get started with Firebase or Parse, but like you mentioned, we're convinced that GraphQL is the future of APIs. That's why we're building Graphcool (https://www.graph.cool/) which is a Serverless GraphQL Backend. Here is a short tutorial on how to get started: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SooujCyMHe4

Regarding the ability to "switch away": https://www.graph.cool/docs/faq/graphcool-moving-projects-aw...

[AtheistOfFail]

Those concerns would be greatly addressed by having an "on-premises Firebase" option, even if everything went sideways, I could slowly migrate my projects off of firebase slowly.

[luigi23]

> Firebase isn't going anywhere.

Yeah, I heard the same about Parse.