Firebase was a company that developed backend software. It was founded in

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

in 2011 and was incorporated in Delaware. In 2014, Firebase was bought by

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

. Its name continues as a set of backend

cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

services and application development platforms provided by Google. It hosts databases, services, authentication, and integration for a variety of applications, including Android,

iOS Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

, Node.js,

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, Unity,

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, and C++.

History

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 out 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's 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 Seed money, also known as seed funding or seed capital, is a form of securities offering in which an investor puts capital in a startup company in exchange for an equity stake or convertible note stake in the company. The term ''seed'' suggests ...

from

venture capital Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to start-up company, startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in ...

ists Flybridge Capital Partners, Greylock Partners, Founder Collective, and

New Enterprise Associates New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is an American-based venture capital firm. NEA focuses investment stages ranging from seed stage through growth stage across an array of industry sectors. With over $25 billion in committed capital, NEA is one of t ...

. In June 2013, the company further raised $5.6 million in Series A funding from

Union Square Ventures Union Square Ventures (USV) is an American venture capital firm based in New York City. The firm has backed more than 130 startups, including Twitter, Etsy, Stripe, Coinbase, Zynga, Tumblr, Stack Overflow, Meetup, Kickstarter, MongoDB, ...

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 Divshot, an

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web-hosting platform, to merge it with the Firebase team.

Further development under Google

In May 2016, at

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, the company's annual developer conference, Google introduced Firebase Analytics and announced that it was expanding its services to become a unified backend-as-a-service (BaaS) platform for mobile developers. Firebase now integrates with various other Google services, including

Google Cloud Platform Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a suite of cloud computing services offered by Google that provides a series of modular cloud services including computing, Computer data storage, data storage, Data analysis, data analytics, and machine learnin ...

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, and

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to offer broader products and scale for developers. Google Cloud Messaging, the Google service to send push notifications to Android devices, was superseded by a Firebase product,

Firebase Cloud Messaging Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), formerly known as Google Cloud Messaging (GCM), is a cross-platform cloud service for messages and Notification service, notifications for Android (operating system), Android, iOS, and web applications, which as o ...

, 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 team. In January 2017, Google acquired Fabric and Crashlytics from

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to add those services to Firebase. In October 2017, Google launched Cloud Firestore, a real-time

document database A document-oriented database, or document store, is a computer program and data storage system designed for storing, retrieving and managing document-oriented information, also known as Semi-structured model, semi-structured data. Document-orie ...

as the successor product to the original Firebase Realtime Database.

User privacy controversies

Firebase software has been claimed to be used by Google to track users without their knowledge. On July 14, 2020, a lawsuit was filed accusing Google of violating federal wire tap law and California privacy law. It stated that through Firebase, Google collected and stored user data, logging what the user was looking at in many types of apps, despite the user following Google's own instructions to turn off the web and app activity collected by the company. The lawsuit was dismissed in January 2022, with Chief US District Judge Richard Seeborg ruling that a promise to avoid collecting user data did not amount to a contract.

References

{{Google LLC 2014 mergers and acquisitions Cloud computing providers Google acquisitions Software companies established in 2011 Software companies disestablished in 2014 Defunct software companies of the United States 2011 establishments in California 2014 disestablishments in California American companies established in 2011 American companies disestablished in 2014 Software companies based in California