this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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Privacy
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I want to add to this: In my country (Poland, but probably many others) you are sometimes almost forced to be tracked by FAANG companies. For example our mObywatel app, which can be uses as driver's license replacement requires you to download it via Google Play and have Google Services installed. Of course it uses firebase to send notifications.
Firebase really is the curse of modern software development
Could you eli5 what's bad about it?
It's yet another service in the hands of Google and a proprietary library, far too many apps depend on it to send push notifications, which isn't unexpected when Google, which owns Android, has made it the only standard push service by leveraging their position of power and in turn Unified Push and all its free implementations had to come from the community, but almost no app uses it, because everyone is used to Firebase by this point.
That's the open platform aspect, it is also a privacy concern because it means that most apps will have your notifications pass through Google's servers, I don't think they can necessarily read the content, but the time of reception and sending and where it comes from is metadata that they certainty see
Can't you use a normal license instead?