Firebase public roadmap

[Nicholas Faiz]

Hi,

A question for a member of the Firebase team. Perhaps some other community members might be able to help me ...

Just wondering if the Firebase team has a public roadmap of upcoming features. We're particularly interested in keeping watch of what might be added so we don't redundantly add future functionality such as working with a particular login provider, writing our own method to handle push notifications to devices, etc., etc..

Thanks,

Nicholas

[Daxno]

+1 on this. A public roadmap would be great.

To give an example of how this would be useful:

A while back I needed to decide whether to use the existing javascript codebase from a web app I've made to start building the 'sibling' mobile app, or go platform native.

Because I had no clue when offline support for javascript is coming I reluctantly decided to go platform native (because offline support is obviously important for mobile apps).

If there was a roadmap that stated that offline support for javascript would arrive in, for example, Q3 2015, I probably would have made the decision to go for javascript. Which would have saved me a huge amount of dev time.

[Jason Spafford]

I think this would be an extremely useful thing for the community. I think the roadmap is probably dictated by the needs of enterprise customers but I can also highly suggest a UserVoice for premium subscribers. I want projection on queries but I have no idea how far out that is or even if I should be waiting for them.

[Kato Richardson]

@Nicholas, No, we don't have a public road map at this time.

@Daxno, Thanks for the additional feedback! There are some merits to having a public road map, but to offer a counter-point to your thoughts on release dates, I found an email from a Firebase member over 1.5 years old that mentioned push notifications being released in the next couple of months. If you had bet the bank on that prediction, you'd still be waiting. Release timelines can definitely be a double-edge sword and it's doubtful they would actually assist you with making development decisions.

The other extreme is that they create artificial deadlines on product features and result in half-baked releases; this is the opposite of the Firebase motto, which is to do the features right and make the API amazing, rather than as good as we can get it "before release."  We appreciate both your opinion and your patience with our philosophy.

@Jason, Hi! Queries are already part of the core product. Could you explain which features you're looking for?

☃, Kato

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[Steffen Frost]

@Kato, it would be cool to have some visibility as to the roadmap or, at the very least, to know which efforts have a priority or are being actively worked on. Target release dates would be nice, with the understanding they are not commitments.   Having the developer community give feedback as to priorities might be helpful to the Firebase team.

-steffen

[Kato Richardson]

Hi Steffen. Great to hear your thoughts here too; they echo my own. Public road maps aren't really a Google philosophy, but I'll continue to take this feedback to the team and see what we can do to provide more visibility into the future, and to tighten the feedback loop. In the mean time, keep the feedback coming!

Have a great day,

Kato

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