Products · Product
Firebase
Raised as a usability problem by 29 people on Hacker News over 14 years (2013–2026), in 27 threads.
People raised many different problems with Firebase, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 31 complaints
- Simple basic HTTP auth for a static site requires spinning up complex cloud services2026-09-06
- Billing lags, so spending keeps running past limits before any alert or shutoff triggers2025-01-17
- Google's documentation is impenetrable and hard to understand2024-10-23
- Crash reporting tools are too complicated and don't surface the needed state2024-05-19
- Crash reporting tools are overly complicated and don't surface Redux state or navigation path2024-05-19
- Security rules are a raw config file, hard for newer developers to set correctly2024-03-18
- Unintuitive with many footguns that cause lost data and surprise bills2024-01-13
- Lots of hard-to-find clickops configuration steps needed to get anything working2024-01-10
- Emulator is flaky and poorly documented, leaving users with more questions than answers2024-01-10
- Docs are counterintuitive and the chart is easy to misread, costing a day2023-04-14
- Users wait many minutes for the email, never find it, or click invalidated links2022-06-28
- Testers must manually download each update themselves instead of it installing automatically2021-12-14
- Firebase console for managing push subscriptions is a poorly designed single-page app2021-11-19
- Emulator setup is hard, requiring code changes to switch between local and live functions2021-02-23
- Free tier silently upgrades to paid account, leaving no room to experiment2020-12-10
- Dark patterns make analytics seem required when enabling it is optional2020-09-13
- Functions have very slow cold starts, making them laggy to use2020-05-27
- Querying is unintuitive because server-side query options are lacking2020-05-27
- Deploying cloud functions takes minutes and most can't run locally, slowing development2020-04-29
- Functions can't be tested locally and deploys take minutes, sometimes getting stuck2020-03-24
- Links meant for websites push users toward installing an app instead2018-03-31
- Red X icon is too easy to click accidentally, deleting data2017-08-09
- Firebase and Google console interfaces are terrible, with worry the Crashlytics UI will get worse2017-01-18
- Couldn't tell how the many overlapping Google login products and APIs differ2016-11-08
- Can't find a download link on the website2016-10-08
- Finding current docs and examples is hard; old deprecated guides keep appearing in search2016-09-19
- Bolt compiler errors give unhelpful line-one column messages, and permission-denied errors don't say which field failed2016-09-18
- Password reset link breaks when username is an email address, due to unencoded URL2015-12-17
- No way to decline repeated prompts; pop-ups kept moving, pushing users to link2015-12-17
- Couldn't resolve Firebase bindings in routeProvider, forcing boilerplate inside the controller2013-09-18
- Small 404 message is easily missed, so non-technical users think they reached the wrong page2013-08-10