I was a new employee at Google when we started talking to Firebase. The founders are super smart and get stuff done.

However, I remember saying to the VP who was leading the acquisition, “shouldn’t we decide what market we want to be in, then evaluate if we should build, buy, or partner?”

He said “no, we should buy it first then figure out what to do”.

I’m not surprised Firebase feels like it’s bolted on. They never really knew what they wanted to do with it. That was true then and it’s true now.

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.

Calling them a 3rd party push notification vendor is being generous. Google is still doing the push notification and I guess OneSignal offers a wrapper around the libs.

Yes, so basically all Android devices comes with Play Services that's why we need firebase. But in regions like China they have their own Play Services alternative and inorder to send notifications to those devices OneSignal or others provides a unified wrapper.

Er no?

Be hyperbolic if you want, but there are LOTS of apps on the Play Store that do not have internet access, let alone a dependency on Firebase.

With push notifications?

Using UnifiedPush with ntfy [1] as push distributor, used Prosody as well with Conversations as distributor which did work but I prefer ntfy because it does its one thing well.

[1] https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy

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.

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 wasn't aware that Supabase is self-hostable - thanks for pointing that out, will have a look. Customer is in Europe, if they decide to move away from Firebase, they don't want to migrate to another managed platform run by a US company (digital sovereignty etc.)

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.

While Firebase has support for queries with realtime updates and offline caching, I wouldn't quite call it offline sync.