Firebase

Key Features 1. Authentication It supports authentication using passwords, phone numbers, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and more. The Firebase Authentication (SDK) can be used to manually integrate one or more sign-in methods into an app. 2. Realtime database Data is synced across all clients in real time and remains available even when an app goes offline. 3. Hosting Firebase Hosting provides fast hosting for a web app; content is cached into content delivery networks worldwide. 4. Test lab The application is tested on virtual and physical devices located in Google’s data centers. 5. Notifications Notifications can be sent with firebase with no additional coding. Firebase evolved from Envolve, a prior startup founded by James Tamplin and Andrew Lee in 2011. Envolve provided developers an API that enables the integration of online chat functionality into their websites. After releasing the chat service, Tamplin and Lee found that it was being used to pass application data that were not chat messages. Developers were using Envolve to sync application data such as game state in real time across their users. Tamplin and Lee decided to separate the chat system and the real time architecture that powered it. They founded Firebase as a separate company in 2011 and it launched to the public in April 2012. Firebase's first product was the Firebase Realtime Database, an API that synchronizes application data across IOS, Android, and Web devices, and stores it on Firebase cloud. The product assists software developers in building real time, collaborative applications. In May 2012, a month after the beta launch, Firebase raised $1.1 million in seed funding from venture capitalists Flybridge Capital Partners, Greylock Partners, Founder Collective, and New Enterprise Associates. In june 2013, the company further raised $5.6 million in Series A funding from Union Square Ventures and Flybridge Capital Partners. In 2014, Firebase launched two products: Firebase Hosting and Firebase Authentication. This positioned the company as a mobile backend as a service. In October 2014, Firebase was acquired by Google. A year later, in October 2015, Google acquired Diveshot, an HTML5 web hosting platform, to merge it with the Firebase team In may 2016, at GOogle I/O, the company’s annual developer conference, Firebase introduced Firebase Analytics and announced that it was expanding its services to become an unfired backend as a service (BaaS) platform for mobile developers. Firebase now integrates with various other Google services, including Google Cloud Messaging, which added the functionality to deliver push notifications to Android, IOS and web devices. In july 2016, Google announced that it was acquiring the mobile developer platform LaunchKit, which specialized in app developer marketing, and would be folding it into the Firebase Growth Tools teams. In January 2017, Google acquired Fabric and Crashlytics from Twitter to add those services to FirebaseIn october 2017, Firebase launched Cloud Firestore, a real time document database as the successor product to the original Firebase Realtime Database.