Firebase is a platform for creating mobile and web applications developed by Google. It was originally an independent company founded in 2011. In 2014, Google acquired the platform and it is now their flagship offering for app development.
History
Firebase evolved from Envolve, a prior startup founded by James Tamplin and Andrew Lee in 2011. Envolve provided developers an API that enables the integration of online chat functionality into their websites. After releasing the chat service, Tamplin and Lee found that it was being used to pass application data that were not chat messages. Developers were using Envolve to sync application data such as game state in real time across their users. Tamplin and Lee decided to separate the chat system and the real-time architecture that powered it. They founded Firebase as a separate company in September 2011 and it launched to the public in April 2012. Firebase's first product was the Firebase Real-time Database, an API that synchronizes application data across iOS, Android, and Web devices, and stores it on Firebase's cloud. The product assists software developers in building real-time, collaborative applications. In May 2012, a month after the beta launch, Firebase raised $1.1 million in seed funding from venture capitalistsFlybridge Capital Partners, Greylock Partners, Founder Collective, and New Enterprise Associates. In June 2013, the company further raised $5.6 million in Series A funding from Union Square Ventures and Flybridge Capital Partners. In 2014, Firebase launched two products. Firebase Hosting and Firebase Authentication. This positioned the company as a mobile backend as a service. In October 2014, Firebase was acquired by Google. A year later, in October 2015, Google acquired Divshot, an HTML5 web-hosting platform, to merge it with the Firebase team. In May 2016, at Google I/O, the company's annual developer conference, Firebase introduced Firebase Analytics and announced that it was expanding its services to become a unified backend-as-a-service platform for mobile developers. Firebase now integrates with various other Google services, including Google Cloud Platform, AdMob, and Google Ads to offer broader products and scale for developers. Google Cloud Messaging, the Google service to send push notifications to Android devices, was superseded by a Firebase product, Firebase Cloud Messaging, which added the functionality to deliver push notifications to both iOS and web devices. In January 2017, Google acquired Fabric and Crashlytics from Twitter to add those services to Firebase. In October 2017, Firebase has launched Cloud Firestore, a real-time document database as the successor product to the original Firebase Realtime Database.
Products
The Firebase platform has 18 products split into three groups: Develop, Quality, and Grow.
User privacy controversies
Firebase has been claimed to be used by Google to track users without their knowledge. On July 14, 2020, a lawsuit was filed accusing Google of violating federal wire tap law and California privacy law. It stated that through Firebase, Google collected and stored users data, logging what the user are looking at in many types of apps, despite the user following Google's own instructions to turn off the web and app activity collected by the company.
