Tutorials

Google’s Cloud Firestore is a tool that should be in every mobile app developer’s tool belt. The flexible and scalable database that it provides is unlike anything a coder could create alone and if your app is designed for a global audience, there aren’t many solutions like it. Plus, there’s a Flutter package ( cloud_firestore) that’s designed to make Flutter and Flame play nicely together. Unfortunately, there is one downside. The tool isn’t free to use and every read/write transaction your app makes with the Firestore database is counted against your daily quota (50,000 daily reads and 20,000 daily writes for the free tier plan). Therefore, it’s essential you design your database with these usage limits in mind…otherwise, your dreams of creating a profitable mobile app will be stamped out like a flame. ...

The Legend of the Multi-Colored TabBar A majority of popular mobile apps on the app store use a tried and true navigation scheme: the Bottom Navigation Bar. The idea is to have all 4 or 5 of the app’s main activities visible and within thumb’s reach. If you do a quick browse through the apps on your phone, you’ll find this pattern is far and away the most used. Bottom Navigation Bar Apps: ...

Firebase is awesome and I’ve used it in more apps than I can count (assuming I can only count to about 20). It has authentication, data storage, an intuitive querying SDK, and plenty of other features that most mobile app developers find themselves wanting at one point or another. So why replace it? I asked myself the same question many times and more than once my answer was “Don’t”. It had just about everything I needed…and then I was asked to implement End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) in a social media app. I managed to do it based on this Stack Overflow answer but the solution was complicated and if a user ever wanted to change devices they needed to encrypt their old private key, save it to Firestore, change devices, download the encrypted private key, and then decrypt it. There were a few other difficulties (some that I’m still working through) and I finally began to rethink my devotion to the god named Google. ...

I’ve used Google’s Firebase/Firestore database solution for nearly 6 months and had come to believe that it was an unstoppable force. If you’re only dealing with numbers, strings, and other simple data forms, this is true. The NoSQL database gives you immense control over how you store information a provides querying tools that can be used to find items meeting very specific criteria in a snap. But if you’re interested in storing and retrieving larger files like images and audio clips, Firestore is not the solution you need. ...