I created a Project using Google Firebase. In this project I added 6 iOS apps that I want to track and manage under a single Firebase Project. The apps are sports related and I wanted to have all of them share the same project for monitoring and management and possibly sharing data with each other. Initially the apps will use Firebase Authentication, Crashlytics, FireStore and push notifications. Over time more of the Firebase services will be added (i.e. A/B Testing, Remove Config, etc.). One the summer I will be adding 6 Android apps. These have been in development over the last 6 months and all the Firebase features appear to be working fine.
Are there issues or downside to setting up multiple iOS apps under a single project? When I setup the apps under the Firebase console it did not restrict me to a single iOS app per Firebase project nor did it give me any warning. My cause of concern is the Firecast from Google titled “Getting Started with Firebase: https://firebase.google.com/docs/ios/setup . Project setup is discussed at the 1:25 mark talking about multiple apps in the same project and the diagram shows 4 apps in the project. An app can be an iOS, Android or Web app and one possible scenario is to create a single project with 3 apps (iOS, Android, Web) which share login and user data. At the 2:20 mark it states “… there is nothing to be gained by cramming them into the same project besides tears and heartache.” but it doesn’t specify what the “tears and heartache” issues are. I googled around and checked additional documentation and no warnings are given or information on best practices.
I did see a posting on Stack-overflow from a Google engineer regarding deep linking that was supposed to be addressed in Q1 2018 (over a year ago).firebase-dynamic-links-for-multiple-ios-apps-in-project .
The one issue we did run into is that we can’t use Facebook authentication in our app. The authentication is setup at the project level for all the apps. But Facebook requires each individual app to be registered for authentication and does not allow the user to register a group of apps. So this prevents us from using Firebase login, but this is the only issue we’ve encountered. We MAY run into a similar issue with Twitter, Yahoo, or another service if we add them as login options. For now we are just using Google sign in along with email sign up.
Any guidance here would be appreciated as we plan on shipping the apps at the start of summer. If we need to reconfigure the apps so each one is in a different Firebase Project we can do that but it’s additional work and we have not run into any issues during development and QA.
