While building standalone mobile application, usually you don’t need to worry about Cloud solutions. If you need some data, you probably store it on Firebase, authentication is most likely covered by Firebase as well. But when It comes to building Full stack mobile project, where you have your backend, you should be thinking of choosing the best solution for your needs. Why the best solution for such projects is Google Cloud Platform? Let’s get into details.
Cloud providers
We have a few cloud providers out there, at least the most popular ones are:
- AWS
- Azure
- Google Cloud Platform
Let’s start with AWS, why I didn’t choose that solution? It is unintuitive. I worked with AWS on a few projects and I hate it. Finding anything in there or learning how it works or how much it costs is terrible. But that might be just a subjective opinion of mine.
To be honest, I have never worked with Azure, but it is a Microsoft centred cloud, and I have never worked with .NET or whatever. But for the same reason I have never worked with it, it might not be the best choice for Full stack mobile project. At the end we usually tend to work with technologies that we already know (for example Kotlin) and it is not so well integrated with mobile ecosystem. However, it is worth mentioning that Microsoft is working on better mobile support. For example, they already have less popular Firebase alternative – App Center.
Google Cloud Platform is the best choice for Cloud for Full stack mobile project. It is well integrated with Firebase, migration is a lot easier, and you can easily cooperate with Firebase services. Almost all key Firebase service have their substitute on GCP, and they can be converted without lose of data!
- Firebase Authentication – Identity Platform
- Firestore – GCP Firestore
- Firebase Storage – GCP Storage
So why Google Cloud for Full stack mobile project?
If your project is already built with use of Firebase, you really wouldn’t have simpler option out there to migrate. The way GCP and Firebase cooperates is just something you need to migrate your project to proper backend. You can do it step by step, starting with authorization, then storage, functions, firestore and so on. At the end you can even export Firestore data and import it to your relational database, but it is something more complex to be done.
If you didn’t start project yet, there are also a few reasons to choose GCP over other options. You can start with Firebase to save up on development time at the beginning and later migrate to custom backend.
When you start with customly built backend there are a few reasons as well. Firebase SDKs for clients work well with GCP as well! So you won’t need to implement Authorization, Storage, and others manually! What is more, Firebase Cloud Messaging (which is also accessible in GCP) works the best with android devices. Android has pretty strict energy saving rules, thats why the only option to have reliable Push Notification in app is using FCM.
Last reason I am mentioning here is just easier payments, as you have payments for Firebase and GCP in one place, but this is not as significant reason to go with GCP.
Summary
You can choose any Cloud Solution you want to, and mobile app will work well. It is just little things that make your development of Full stack mobile project easier. Firebase is a good BaaS to start the project with, but there are also some other open source alternatives of Firebase that might help you to build an app with other cloud solutions.
