Firestore Blob/bytes storage question

[dee...@gmail.com]

When I store a Uint8Array to Firestore using the the node.js admin sdk, the data appears as a base64 string in the Firestore explorer. The docs seem to imply that storing bytes (or a blob from the client sdks) is more efficient than simply storing base64 strings, but the explorer seems to indicate that it's just storing a base64 string. Can someone confirm that there is an advantage to storing bytes/blobs vs base64 strings.

I'm asking because I'm sharing code between my app and firebase functions, and I'd rather not have to deal with Blobs in the app, and Uint8Arrays in functions if there's no benefit over reading and writing base64 strings on both sides.

Thanks

[Ray Sarno]

Upvote. I'm also trying to use the Bytes data type and interested in the answer to this.