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Many third-party service providers can help you grow your business by either providing specific services like Notifications by Twillio or a vast range of services like AWS, and Google Cloud Platform, which includes hosting, storage, authentication, and whatnot. In this article, we will describe very useful Firebase services dependent on the Google Cloud Platform. So to understand the Firebase services, we have to know about the Firebase.
What Is Firebase?
Firebase was originally developed by Firebase Inc. and later acquired by Google. It provides different kinds of services that help you to develop high-quality mobile and web applications to grow your business. It is compatible with Web, iOS, Android, and OS X clients. With Firebase, developers don’t need to worry about the backend programming, Authentication, API development, database (real-time cloud-hosted NoSQL database and cloud firestorm), File storage, etc. Firebase provides all the services with very efficient and fast performance.
Firebase is a full package that can help in developing your mobile or web applications faster with fewer resources and more efficiency. Now, let’s look at some of the services and use of it.
There are many services which Firebase provides, Most useful of them are:
- Cloud Firestore
- Cloud Functions
- Authentication
- Hosting
- Cloud Storage
- Google Analytics
- Predictions
- Cloud Messaging
- Dynamic Links
- Remote Config
Firebase is a full package that can help in developing your mobile or web applications faster with fewer resources and more efficiency. Now, let’s look at some of the services and use of it.
This article purely focuses on how Firebase services can make the mobile application development process easier.
We know that the widely used services for this purpose are Cloud Messaging, Authentication, Dynamic Links, Predictions, Google Analytics, and Remote Config. Let’s discuss these services in detail.
Cloud Messaging
Everyone needs notifications in their mobile applications in one way or another, for enhanced engagement with their users.
Firebase is a great tool to implement notifications, irrespective of the platform because it is fast, reliable, and scalable to handle your requests. Moreover, you won’t be charged a penny for using this service as it’s free of charge.
You can use the below link to set up the Firebase Cloud Messaging for your project.
https://firebase.google.com/docs/cloud-messaging
It includes Android, Web, C++, and Unity setup.
Authentication
Let’s move on to the next service – Authentication. Firebase provides authentication services for almost every major platform, which includes Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Github, Microsoft, and Yahoo.
Firebase provides authentication using email, password, and phone number using OTP, and it is also free!!!
They charge a few bucks for OTP verification but after ten thousand successful verifications per month. If you don’t have that much user base, you are good to go with free service, and if you have more users, we believe you can pay that amount. (wink wink)
You can use the link below to set up the Firebase Authentication for your project.
It includes iOS, Android, Web, C++, Unity, and Unity setup
Dynamic Links
This service was called Google URL Shortener in the past, but now it is renamed as Dynamic Links. In addition to their name, a couple of new features have been added to this service by the Firebase Team.
This service is majorly used to generate deep links that redirect user traffic to your landing page, website, or mobile applications. They also provide custom domain names. And if you have your domain name, this service can be integrated with that, as well.
Predictions
As the name suggests, this service helps you in making predictions about your product decisions. In my opinion, this service is important to increase your business and revenue. Without having any machine learning experience, you can use this service easily by dividing the users into different fragments, and you can make decisions based on their behavior.
Let’s take an example – suppose you are rolling up a new discount offer notification, and you want to find which age group, gender, platform, and location are more interesting. You can then target the niche, which is not more likely to click on that notification and generate predictions by using the machine learning algorithm of the Firebase. It will help you devise strategies to entice that niche and increase your sales. This way, your users will engage with your application and brand and it is also free.
Google Analytics
Yet another service that helps in growing and managing your business. It can become helpful in tracking user demographics, behavior, purchasing patterns, and revenue reports.
The service provides visualization of all this information with just a single tap. Many of you might be used to this service, as it is widely used in web applications as well. This one is free too.
Remote Config
The last service that we’ll go through is Remote Config. It helps in remotely changing your application UI and content, without publishing it again.
For example, if you have published an application on the stores with provocative words in the static content, but it could not be managed from the back end. If a lot of users have downloaded the app, then how can you avoid this situation of embarrassment?
If it is a normal application, then you can proceed to the process of changing and publishing the application which will take at least a week. But with Remote Config, you can change that content with a single click. More cases of this service can help you moderate the difficulty level of your game application, for a particular user group, without changing its code. Here, I have to mention that you still need to code accordingly.
Conclusion
Wrapping up this article, I will suggest you find and use as many services as you can use, most of them are free. If you have a large user base, then it may not be difficult for you to pay for the services. And we highly recommend you to do so, since these services will be of use in the long run.
