Firebase to Firestore?

[jimijon]

I was wondering if you were going to move the backend to Firestore. Seems more appropriate now, especially for chat. And it is the Direction of Google/Firebase

[bensmiley]

This is something we're considering see Android issue 148 - Add support for Firestore - vote here!.

But it's more of a semi-long term project. There are some advantages:

• Better querying
• Better scalability
• Easier to write security rules

But also some disadvantages:

• A lot of code would need to be rewritten and re-tested
• Firestore is less flexible
• There is no presence functionality built in. It's necessary to use a hack involving Google Cloud Code and the real-time database - article here.
• Project is still in beta

Once the current version of the chat is completely stable we'll start looking to also support Firestore.