Felgo provides components, tools and professional services for developing apps on Mobile, Desktop and Embedded platforms. The Felgo framework extends Qt with 200+ APIs. Among them is support for 3rd party SDK integrations like push notification or analytics, native iOS styling, Qt Quick Controls extensions for native look & feel on Android & iOS, density independence and responsive layout support. Felgo also provides features like AR (Augmented Reality) and Machine Learning integrations…
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Firebase
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Google offers the Firebase suite of application development tools, available free or at cost for higher degree of usages, priced flexibly accorded to features needed. The suite includes A/B testing and Crashlytics, Cloud Messaging (FCM) and in-app messaging, cloud storage and NoSQL storage (Cloud Firestore and Firestore Realtime Database), and other features supporting developers with flexible mobile application development.
It is a very good tool for making all types of mobile and web applications once you know how to use it. It allowed us to realize several application concepts, such as currency converter, pregnancy monitoring, QR code flash for product evaluation. No need for native SDKs, Build in and Install from Cloud with the Felgo Build Server.
Firebase should be your first choice if your platform is mobile first. Firebase's mobile platform support for client-side applications is second to none, and I cannot think of a comparable cross-platform toolkit. Firebase also integrates well with your server-side solution, meaning that you can plug Firebase into your existing app architecture with minimal effort.
Firebase lags behind on the desktop, however. Although macOS support is rapidly catching up, full Windows support is a glaring omission for most Firebase features. This means that if your platform targets Windows, you will need to implement the client functionality manually using Firebase's web APIs and wrappers, or look for another solution.
Ready available solutions for all platform mobile app development.
Live hot reloading of UI and other advance controls by Felgo implemented in Qt.
Using Qt underneath provides an opportunity to developers to use it in all kind of sectors like embedded devices, mobile apps, desktop apps, games etc.
Extremely robust. Has about any tool you can think of under one roof making it extremely useful as a backup platform for data analytics or small teams that need something quickly.
Intuitive and easy UI/UX. Being made and owned by Google, you expect nothing less. Very easy to use for anyone that has any marketing or analytical experience especially in Google Analytics (which I just assume all marketers do).
Safe, secure, and sturdy. Never need to worry about downtimes or misinformation as it's as clean and safe as it is being run by Google.
FREE! What else is there to say. Unless you're an extremely large application handling hundreds of thousands to millions of users, this pay as you go plan will stay free.
Firebase/Firestore has very limited support for querying more complicated items; for example, performing a simple string search is not possible.
While upfront costs are low, costs can grow quickly if you're not careful about what you are being billed for.
Dashboards have at times shown different information to what is billed, and support from Google is less than stellar and not as effective as that from Amazon or Microsoft.
I am happy with the constant feedback that I am receiving from the team. Although most of it is marketing related, there are some interesting and valuable materials that they have been pushing to ease my learning.
The quality of the documentation and the ease of use may be some important values to take into account.
We believe that the agility that we have acquired until now for developing apps for our business cases give this framework an important lead.
As with any product, Felgo has some edges to it, but from our past experiences evaluating "code once, deploy everywhere" platforms, we were really surprised at how fast the team went from exploring, into playing and presenting prototypes in very little time.
The dev cycle is really fast as I can get an almost instantaneous feedback on the changes that I make. And it is refreshing to see how I am able to target several platforms at once.
The javascript plus QML combination made it really easy to pick up for me and I am certain sure that many devs can migrate from Web only into multi-platform in a fast manner.
And there is also the possibility to implement C++ code if the need arises to support and bridge native libraries.
Firebase functions are more difficult to use, there are no concepts of triggers or cascading deletes without the use of Firebase functions. Firebase functions can run forever if not written correctly and cause billing nightmares. While this hasn't happened to us specifically it is a thing that happens more than one realizes.
Our analytics folks handled the majority of the communication when it came to customer service, but as far as I was aware, the support we got was pretty good. When we had an issue, we were able to reach out and get support in a timely fashion. Firebase was easy to reach and reasonably available to assist when needed.
As I was already a C++ and Qt developer, Felgo was obvious choice over other tools. Also its cross-platform solutions for mobile apps and Qt's ability to provide cross-platform tool for all other devices makes this perfect choice.
Before using Firebase, we exclusively used self hosted database services. Using Firebase has allowed us to reduce reliance on single points of failure and systems that are difficult to scale. Additionally, Firebase is much easier to set up and use than any sort of self hosted database. This simplicity has allowed us to try features that we might not have based on the amount of work they required in the past.
Firebase has been able to help us understand reliably, the drop-off in our user flows with their funnel feature. This has made it easy for us to be able to pinpoint weaknesses in our funnel and test and optimize with data as the dependent variable.
From an economic standpoint, we don't pay for Firebase which is great, but as the saying goes "You get what you pay for" also holds true in this context. As we looked to grow and scale, we looked for a paid solution.
From a developer resource standpoint, Firebase has been extremely easy to integrate into our app. Whether it be the event tracking, dynamic links or crash reporting we have not had to waste too much developer time thanks to their well-organized developer docs.
