Firebase
What is Firebase?
Section titled “What is Firebase?”Firebase is a popular backend-as-a-service made by Google, powered under the hood by Google Cloud Platform (GCP) – one of the three major cloud providers alongside Azure and AWS. It’s a key ingredient in tools like FlutterFlow, and in the mobile application world it’s especially famous for its completely free push notification service.
While Firebase offers many services (Auth, Storage, Firestore Database), Mosayic takes a balanced approach and favors Supabase where possible – Supabase simply offers superior functionality in many areas. However, Firebase’s push notification service remains essential, and there’s an additional benefit: setting up a Firebase project also creates a corresponding GCP project.
Free Tier
Section titled “Free Tier”Firebase offers a generous free tier, meaning you won’t face any costs during development. Depending on your app’s resource usage, you may even stay within the free tier permanently – though there are caveats we’ll discuss later.
Creating Your Firebase Project
Section titled “Creating Your Firebase Project”Mosayic will prompt you to create a Firebase project if you don’t have one, then select it from the dropdown.
In the early stages, the only configuration needed is setting up an Android app in Firebase’s App Config. This provides the configuration required for Android push notifications to work.
Mosayic automates the creation of the App Config and downloads the google-services.json file for you – just use the buttons provided.
Upgrading to the Blaze Plan
Section titled “Upgrading to the Blaze Plan”When you’re ready, you can upgrade to Firebase’s Blaze plan (pay-as-you-go), which requires setting up a billing account.
Always be vigilant about your Firebase and Google Cloud spend.
What’s Next
Section titled “What’s Next”We’ll return to Firebase and the GCP project later in the documentation. For now, this initial setup is all that’s needed.