alt Hacker NewsI remember first learning about Firebase when working on Android push notifications, a loooooong time ago (~2011 i think). Over time it grew into this full-featured app development platform, after an aquisition (don’t remember the name).
These days however it feels a bit neglected, and somehow poorly bolted on to GCP. I still have a few production apps running on it and news like this reinforces my belief that it’s in decline.
What are folks using these days that (ideally) is open source and self-hostable? I don’t want to lock in with another platform. Some of these apps use the offline sync feature of Firestore (apps used in basements and other low-connectivity areas).
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Yes that's the sad part, if you want to integrate Push Notification in your app, and you want to use a 3rd party vendor like OneSignal etc, you still need a fuckin FIREBASE account & FIREBASE dependencies in your app. So every app on the Play Store comes with firebase dependency.
Especially for offline sync Firebase is still much stronger than other all-in-one solutions.
The real alternative there would be to use some SQLite syncing solution and a different solution for auth and cloud compute.
I guess Supabase is the obvious contender. It doesn't provide the actual frontend hosting though, which is a bit of a pain because now you have two problems.
I'm working on an alternative (phaselock.io) which is still in alpha but it is open-source and self-hostable.
Offline mode and cross-platform support are some of the features most important to me.