
Open sourcing the Firebase SDKs - jamest
https://opensource.googleblog.com/2017/05/open-sourcing-firebase-sdks.html
======
jamest
[other Firebase founder] It was painful to read the article[1] this morning,
especially since I was one of the people responsible for dropping the ball on
getting Home Automation the credit to cover the overage a few weeks ago. We're
working with the founder to make sure he's in a better spot. If you have
similarly serious issues, my email is: james@firebase.com

To address a couple of points that have been raised:

1\. We're aware that as we've integrated with Google our support response time
& quality has decreased. I'm working with our team to do better.

2\. We know better querying and web offline are needed for the Realtime
Database, stay tuned.

Finally, I hope you enjoy all the new features that launched today!
([https://firebase.googleblog.com/2017/05/whats-new-from-
fireb...](https://firebase.googleblog.com/2017/05/whats-new-from-firebase-at-
google-io.html)) Leave a comment if you have thoughts/comments.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14356409](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14356409)

~~~
Top19
To my discredit I enjoyed dumping on Google earlier today with the Firebase
support issue article.

That being said this was a great response and I appreciate it. Also my first
React Native app used Firebase and I have fond memories of setting that up :)

I like that item #1 was very direct...essentially: "look the support got worse
and it's not good but we're working on it".

SIDE NOTE: I don't get how a lot of people today don't understand that using
vague language in apologies doesn't help with apologies. It definitely used
to, but then everyone started doing it, and now the cool / rare thing to do is
to be direct. Maybe the pendulum will swing back someday. Until then thank you
Mr.Google/Firebase/James person.

~~~
josephg
I enjoyed dumping on Google earlier too. I love firebase, but I've talked two
companies I've worked with out of using it for new, mission critical projects.
The earlier article made me feel completely vindicated in my recommendations.

I simply have no trust that:

\- Google won't randomly cancel firebase (wave, reader, etc)

\- Google won't randomly, suddenly jack up the prices for firebase, leaving
users in the lurch (appengine)

\- When something mission critical breaks or changes, I'll have any way of
contacting someone who cares, no matter how much my company is paying for the
service. (Google's support forums are a pit of sorrow)

I was reading an article the other day talking about personhood[1]. It makes
the point that part of being a member of society is the idea of _standing_.
That is, if you break your word there has to be a way for you to lose out as a
result. If there isn't, its impossible for anyone to enter into an agreement
with you because you can't be trusted. Forming an agreement requires both
sides to have skin in the game.

I don't genuinely believe that google has skin in the game when it comes to
cloud services for small-to-medium customers. Its just too easy for them to
drop the ball, stop answering emails and leave customers in the lurch. They've
done it again and again. I'd say its the default way Google operates.

Thomas Schelling from The Strategy of Conflict:

> Among the legal privileges of corporations, two that are mentioned in
> textbooks are the right to sue and the "right" to be sued. Who wants to be
> sued! But the right to be sued is the power to make a promise: to borrow
> money, to enter a contract, to do business with someone who might be
> damaged. If suit does arise, the "right" seems a liability in retrospect;
> beforehand it was a prerequisite to doing business.

Please, firebase. Please be different. But know that thats the reputation
you're fighting against. Thats the reputation you've inherited by joining
Google. But for now I'm standing by my earlier recommendations.

[1] [http://www.meltingasphalt.com/personhood-a-game-for-two-
or-m...](http://www.meltingasphalt.com/personhood-a-game-for-two-or-more-
players/)

~~~
victorhooi
I think you've mischaracterised things a bit in your post - not sure if this
is just because you're repeating what you read elsewhere? Anyhow, regarding
the bullet points:

1\. Google Wave was released an experimental consumer product, designed to
combine the best of IM and email. According to the announcement, it was
finally sunset due to lack of interest from the public. Personally, I was
super excited about Wave - I even pestered an ex-Googler at the time to get me
in on the preview. (I was in uni at the time). However, I had a _lot_ of
trouble getting other people to use it.

Did you personally use Wave yourself? Were you able to convert anybody else to
using it?

Firstly - this is hardly apples to oranges. You're comparing a experimental
consumer-oriented preview product, to an enterprise offering with SLAs. It
would be like if we released a Star Wars game showcasing awesome new WebGL
features - then decided to sunset it 12 months later.

Secondly - the project was open-sourced and then moved to under the Apache
banner - an effort that in itself took significant engineering effort.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave)

I'm not really sure what more you want?

In the case of Reader - this is somewhat personal, as I was a big lover of
Google Reader as well. From memory, it was deprecated with around 12 months of
notice, there were provisions for migrating/exporting all your data etc. It
wasn't open-sourced like Wave, but there were reasons behind that (I can't
comment). However, it was hardly the worst handled deprecation - and to be
honest, the writing was on the wall for RSS for a long time before that.

2\. You didn't provide any specifics, so I'm not sure what event you're
referring to.

AFAIK, the only major price change was when Google AppEngine left
beta/preview, and became an actual commercial product, and Google added SLAs,
and other things etc:

[https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-
appengine/Hluog1_a3n4...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-
appengine/Hluog1_a3n4/uFMhaBWhVi8J)

The changes were announced at I/O that year (May), I believe, and the actual
changes took effect in September.

Is that what you're referring to? Because even taken aside my Google hat, that
seems like a fairly reasonable thing to do.

3\. All of Google's enterprise offerings have support. I know, because I
actually work in such a support team. For GSuite, support comes free as part
of the product - you can contact us via email/chat or over the phone.

For GCP, there are commercial support packages available
([https://cloud.google.com/support/](https://cloud.google.com/support/))
(similar to the AWS model).

> They've done it again and again. I'd say its the default way Google
> operates.

This is a pretty bold claim - can you cite any examples of this?

If this is something that personally affected you - please feel free to reach
out to me. I can't promise I can fix everything, but I can definitely try to
find out more for you, or see what I can do internally.

Disclaimer: I work for Google, but views expressed above are my own.

~~~
lobster_johnson
It's my understanding that Google has ramped up enterprise cloud support by
outsourcing it. We ran into evidence of this recently. It's not helpful when
the heavily accented, scripted Indian support guy at the other end is less
technically informed than yourself, and there's no magic phrase to get bumped
up to the next support level.

We're on Google Cloud Platform because of Kubernetes, and I'm dreading the day
where we will need urgent support for something. My only consolation is that
the Kubernetes community is very active, with lots of googlers on Github,
Slack, Google Groups, and so on. We're trying to avoid using services outside
of GKE in order to keep our vendor lock-in minimal (Kubernetes potentially
allows us to switch vendors), and to stay within the realm of Kubernetes.

You have to face it -- Google's reputation has been severely damaged over the
years, not just things like Reader, but also AppEngine, Google Apps support,
arbitrary account shutdowns, and so on. Even innocuous, well-intentioned
deprecations are hurting your rep these days, and you should consider avoiding
this just to let your karma recharge; people will eventually forget and
forgive, but if a new breaking change happens every month, they won't.
(Contrast the situation to AWS, which has hardly deprecated anything since
they started up, and manages to keep unpopular products running years after
they became effectively obsolete.)

~~~
victorhooi
Commenting on mobile - but no, GCP support is not outsourced. I deal with and
am good friends with some of those on the frontline for GCP support - that
team works a few cubicles down from me, and from what I've seen incredibly
passionate about providing stellar support.

Are you sure you didn't perhaps just talk to a Googler who happened to be
Indian? It's possible I'm misreading tone on the go - but 1. Google is very
multicultural, 2. As a non-white, I admit I can be a little touchy when people
assume things about technical chops based on your race, or what accent your
English is.

Regarding the fact you felt the person you dealt with wasn't well informed,
that's not good to hear. Do you want to 1:1 details to me?

Also, I assume you've purchased GCP support right? That's a paid offering, and
having dealt with them as an outsider, they're pretty decent (I mean, you are
paying them...). I only ask because sometimes people post in public forums and
assume they're dealing with official support. Our actual enterprise support
teams are separate.

------
depoll
I was an early Parse engineer (4th engineer to join the company) and now am
the SDK engineering lead for Firebase.

The experience of working on Firebase at Google is vastly different from Parse
at Facebook, and it shows in Google’s continued commitment to building and
expanding Firebase, integrating it with its Cloud Platform products, and
otherwise pouring huge amounts of effort into making Firebase great for
developers. Open sourcing our SDKs gives us even more ways to engage with the
developer community and allows us to be more transparent with the progress
we’re making.

This announcement is just a first step down the path toward more transparency
with our SDKs, but we hope to foster community and build trust in the tools
we’re developing, and welcome your contributions!

~~~
salimmadjd
That's great! But it does make sense why google and FB would be taking
different paths here.

As much as I was disappointed with FB's decision on Parse, I can also
understand the reasoning behind it and I actually think it was the right
decisions for the company. In contrast, Google is playing in the cloud service
vertical and investing in the future of Firebase is totally aligned with that
objective.

~~~
daxfohl
Though it does seem kind of odd that facebook _isn 't_ playing in that space.
I'd be curious to know their reasoning for not launching a competing product
there.

------
Brahma111
This post shows, how mis-informed the community can be. If you have been
following up Google Cloud and Firebase, most of the questions regarding long
term support, phasing out and Google turning rogue wouldn't be asked. Firebase
is one key aspect of Google's cloud strategy. Pretty much everything on Mobile
services is tied with Firebase, some way or the other. We have now built 2
products on Firebase and are reasonably happy. The real-time nature of FB
makes it alluring to so many use cases.

Having said that, Google should surely address questions on pricing and
supporting other key Mobile platforms like Xamarin. Tweeting to the Firebase
handle on issues never get replied. With other bleeding edge services that
Google provides, Firebase certainly has positioned itself nice. The teething
issues should be small things to fix.

~~~
bad_user
> _Tweeting to the Firebase handle on issues never get replied._

Is that really how you expect to get support?

~~~
flukus
Sadly it's often the most effective way. Companies pay a lot for social media
monitoring and anything that gets a lot of tweets they'll act on.

~~~
bad_user
Well obviously some companies disagree.

Interactions on Twitter are shallow, which makes support interactions risky
and unsatisfactory for the customer ;-)

Which is why any sane company will only reply " _Please mail us at ..._ ".

~~~
jamest
Yes, we don't reply on Twitter since it became difficult to operate across
multiple channels as we scaled.

I've just updated our Twitter bio to make it clear where to go for support:

[http://twitter.com/firebase](http://twitter.com/firebase)

------
yeldarb
How about open sourcing the realtime database server?

Would love to be able to do offline local development.

~~~
HodGreeley
With Couchbase Mobile, we shy away from the "realtime" claim, because it's
vague. (Ask a high-frequency trader how they define realtime...) Having said
that, we have customers that are very happy with the response times. Always
been open-source. Check our blogs for steps to get everything set up front to
back to develop on one machine.

------
themihai
I didn't even know that the client was not open source. What makes this
Firebase less risky than Parse or the recently deprecated Prediction API?

~~~
salqadri
See the reply above by depoll:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14362877](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14362877)

------
PanosJee
Not any news on the Fabric dismantle. What brand stays alive? Will everything
become Firebase?

~~~
jamest
There was a couple of pieces of news:

1\. We're merging Digits into Firebase Authentiation

2\. In the future, Crashlytics will be replacing Firebase Crash Reporting to
become the default crash reporting tool in Firebase.

Hopefully this gives an idea of where we're going.

~~~
PanosJee
Thanks! Are there any plans to move historic data from fabric to firebase or
will I need to reconfigure and start clean?

~~~
phpencil
Authentication data can be imported from Digits to Firebase. No changes to
Crashlytics right now!

------
theprop
This means that I can host my own Firebase-built web application myself? It'll
be just as fast as if it ran on Google's infrastructure (assuming machines are
the same)?

Is this kind of an insinuation that Google plans to drop Firebase soon and
leave it to the open source community to take care of? What are Firebase's
revenues like?

~~~
evan_
This is the client sdk, not the server

------
vassy
I can see there's no Ruby SDK, but are there any plans to build one?

~~~
akanet
I help maintain the unofficial Ruby client for interfacing with the Firebase
Database REST API: [https://github.com/oscardelben/firebase-
ruby](https://github.com/oscardelben/firebase-ruby)

I use it on my fairly high-traffic Firebase site and it works well.

------
marknadal
Wow, this is exactly what I was predicting in my comment on the other thread (
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14359479](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14359479)
). James is solid, great job team!

------
mariogintili
lol funny how there was an article on the top news talking about Firebase's
crazy pricing and now this.

Great way to clean a mess Google!

------
gigatexal
what's new? Bug fix that increases costs by a huge amount. It's a feature not
a bug ;-)

~~~
kyrra
There have been some updates on this situation for those that caught it
earlier today.

Original post has been updated about being contacted by Firebase:
[https://medium.com/@contact_16315/firebase-costs-
increased-b...](https://medium.com/@contact_16315/firebase-costs-increased-
by-7-000-81dc0a27271d)

Firebase founder comment on Medium about it:
[https://medium.com/@startupandrew/firebase-founder-here-
im-v...](https://medium.com/@startupandrew/firebase-founder-here-im-very-
sorry-for-the-surprise-and-frustration-experienced-by-the-poster-b0065c99f53e)
(and he posted the same thing on the HN thread
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14359801](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14359801)
)

(I work at G, opinions are my own).

~~~
gigatexal
I was being needlessly trolly but glad there's some dialog happening. And I'm
sure this will get worked out.

~~~
Piskvorrr
Yup. Same as usual: "unless you are in the Old Boys Club or you raise a great
stink, we ignore you." That's not really what I would call "a dialog
happening."

~~~
gigatexal
Kudos to HN for being the platform for raising said "stink"

