Re: Why do so many people confuse Google's Firebase (cloud API) with Google Services Google Firebase App Indexing (search results)?

Andrew, 2024-06-22 20:48:

Why do so many people (including myself, at first) confuse Google's
Firebase (cloud API) with Google Services Google Firebase App Indexing
(search results)?
 
Firebase (cloud related):
 <https://firebase.google.com/firebase-and-gcp>
 "Firebase and Google Cloud share three products: Cloud Firestore,
  Cloud Functions, and Cloud Storage. These are the same products
  that exist in Google Cloud, simply exposed for client-side
  developers via Firebase. You can access the same data from the
  server SDKs (Google Cloud) and the client SDKs (Firebase),
  so your frontend and backend teams can work in concert."

Firebase App Indexing was part of Firebase and not a separate product:

<https://firebase.google.com/docs/app-indexing?hl=en>

Also note, quote:

"Firebase App Indexing is no longer the recommended way of indexing
content for display as suggested results in Google Search App. This page
points to other useful Google developer products."

[...]

In addition, while the extremely private information stored on your device
for Firebase App Indexing isn't directly uploaded to the Internet, Google
clearly says they will (and do) upload statistics which we have no idea
what they are (nor how frequently they're uploaded, nor to whom) - so
another question is what happens to that extremely private data that is
stored in the Firebase App Index on the cellphone (other than it's included
in search results, presumably those run on the phone's data itself).

If you don't trust Google, don't use their products!

I barely know what Firebase (cloud) and Firebase App Indexing (search) do;
but it's really sad if I know it better than anyone else - hence - I'm
asking everyone else to pitch in so that we can tell, at a glance, which
apps use Firebase App Indexing so that we can avoid them, on sight.

Firebase in general is a framework by Google to build apps which use
additional services for authentication, communication and storage:

<https://firebase.google.com/docs/projects/learn-more?hl=en>

For developers this makes a lot a things easier, since you can use the
Firebase infrastructure instead of implementing
client-server-communication etc. on your own.

But again: if you don't trust Google, don't use their products!

--
Arno Welzel
https://arnowelzel.de