I’m creating a mobile app using flutter and wanted to integrate Social media sign-in (Facebook, Google).
The app is being built using MySQL and by reading the implementation it was required to register the app in Firebase. I was instructed to use only one database in the app,
Does registering the app in Firebase imply i have to register my regular users to Firebase as well or is it just for the API?
I’m using django for the backend.
2
Answers
Firebase products can operate completely independently of each other. If you use Firebase Authentication to authenticate and sign in users, you are not required to also use any Firebase database.
Firebase is a suite of services that includes Authentication, Storage, Realtime Database, Firestore Database, Cloud Functions, Hosting and a whole lot more.
You are not required to use any of the services. You can pick and choose those that meet your needs. So you certainly could use Firebase Authentication with its social logins providers (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, GitHub, etc.) and are not required to use RTDB or Firestore.
The one thing that you might consider is the integration of the Firebase Authentication and whatever "middleware" you plan on using between the mobile app and the MySQL database. Typically your app will have requirements around user authentication and permissions where your middleware would need to be hooked into Firebase Auth to get details about the authenticated user, etc.
It is totally doable to integrate a middleware server (e.g. NodeJS/ExpressJS, a Java or .NET backend, Django, Rails, etc…) to Firebase Auth. It is just more work for you to set that up than what you get essentially effortlessly by using Firestore or RTDB that is already integrated into your Firebase project.