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by mayop100·11y ago·view on hn ↗
Hacker News -

I want to take this opportunity to personally say thank you! The community here has been instrumental to our success. You’ve been our supporters, beta testers, fans, and critics. Even the comment threads here have been a valuable source of feedback :)

I want to reiterate a point that James made in the blog post: Firebase is here to stay, and it’s only going to get better at Google. Our entire team is joining Google, and James and I will continue to run things day-to-day. You’ll still see us around the tech scene at meetups, conferences, and hackathons, and we’ll still be active here and on Twitter.

Thanks again -- big things are coming!

10 comments
Congrats on achieving your goal, it's always a good thing when people get to where they want to go. I'm not trying to be a dick with this: when you say "Firebase is here to stay" you have to be sensitive to history which shows that might not be an honest statement; you can't guarantee that if you no longer own Firebase. I think everyone appreciates your goal will be to keep Firebase strong and growing, but its future is not entirely in your hands.
Do you have anything in writing from Google giving a minimum support time for the Firebase platform?

Who has the final decision about whether Firebase continues going forward?

If you do not have either of these, how can you be sure "Firebase is here to stay, and it’s only going to get better at Google."?

I have come to rely on firebase for a number of my projects, and I have mixed feelings when I see this news. This team does awesome work, though, and I'm glad that they seem to be highly valued.

I hope they will improve integration with AngularJS while not dropping support for Ember and other third party integrations.

We will absolutely not be dropping support for any platforms. We'll support what our customers want to use, whether that's Ember, or iOS, or React.
...until Google decides to pull the plug on Firebase in 6 months to 2 years.
Isn't it more likely their realtime functionality will be integrated or merged with whatever WebSocket initiatives Google has running?

Look at their Google Play services: Android and iOS get realtime, and web is relegated to using a REST API: https://developers.google.com/games/services/

To me that's a huge hole in their services currently that needs to be remedied as the realtime web becomes more pervasive.

My comment was only referring to Firebase as a standalone product/service.

If Google discontinues it yet incorporates the technology into their own products/platforms that is still a loss for developers who use/would have used Firebase.

"Firebase is here to stay, and it’s only going to get better at Google"

I'm curious if that is written contractually, specifically in the deal that you made. Is it? If so exact what is the wording in the contract?

Let's be honest — "Firebase is here to stay" is true right until the moment Google decides it isn't. It is no longer your decision to make (in a way, it never was, if you took external funding).

I realize the intentions are good and I'm actually glad for the team, but I started taking a more realistic view towards these kinds of statements.

Congrats! I remember the debut of firebase at a hackathon back when I could barely code. Since then firebase has become my goto backend for new projects.

Firebase is awesome, keep up the great work!

That first AngelHack? We remember it too. It was a ton of fun!
I remember when firebase was first announced It has always been my goto backend for my quick prototypes. And now using it for our product.
Thanks for a great product. I hope that Google can just leave the product team intact so they can continue to deliver.
Congratulations! Seriously guys! I'm incredibly excited to see this technology become more accessible / used deeper within Google's Cloud stack. I've also loved using this product as of late. Keep up the good work and enjoy this celebration!
Congratulations, guys! Are you going to change offices, or will you still be above me?
How will Firebase grow in relation to Google Cloud Messaging (GCM)? Do you think we could see GCM being replaced with Firebase?