Creating a Cloud Backend for Your Android App Using Firebase

18 months ago I wrote an article on Creating a Cloud Backend for Your Android App Using Parse. Facebook announced earlier this year that they were shutting down Parse on January 28th, 2017 and new signups to the service aren’t possible. With that surprise announcement, this forced developers relying on the service to start looking for alternatives that they could migrate their data to.

Because of this news, I thought I should revisit the topic and cover how to use a different Backend as a Service platform to manage data for your Android application.

For this tutorial, I’ll be looking at Firebase, a popular backend platform acquired by Google in October 2014.

You should always weigh the pros and cons of relying on a BaaS as opposed to building your own. Parse is not the first BaaS platform to shut down (e.g., StackMob) and won’t be the last. As a developer relying on one of these platforms, you should always be ready to migrate and have a backup plan.

With Firebase, you can store and sync data to a NoSQL cloud database. The data is stored as JSON, synced to all connected clients in realtime, and available when your app goes offline. It offers APIs that enable you to authenticate users with email and password, Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, Google, anonymous auth, or to integrate with existing authentication system. It also offers hosting for static assets and offers SSL certificates.

In this article, you’ll create a simple To Do app that will show how to save and retrieve data from Firebase, how to authenticate users, set read/write permissions on the data and validate the data on the server.

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by Joyce Echessa via SitePoint