Supercharge your mobile apps with Cloud Functions for Firebase

Accessing (backend) APIs can be a hassle for mobile engineers. Often, those APIs don’t deliver the data in the format (or structure) we need, so we have to write custom parsing logic on the client.

This is particularly challenging for apps running on multiple platforms, as you have to build and maintain this logic for all the platforms your app is available on. With Cloud Functions for Firebase, you can do all this and much more without having to worry about servers or containers.

## Cloud Functions; what is this really?

Cloud Functions for Firebase is a serverless framework that lets you run backend code in response to events triggered by Firebase features and HTTPS requests. Your JavaScript or TypeScript code is stored in Google’s Cloud and runs in a managed environment. There’s no need to manage and scale your servers. It is very easy to set up and it is very well integrated into other Firebase services such as Firebase Authentication and Cloud Storage.

## Sounds too good to be true? Read on, it gets better!

So on top of it having zero maintenance and easy integration with the Firebase platform, it keeps your logic private and secure. You don’t have to worry about having your code being reverse engineered, if you are doing something highly secure in the app you can easily move it to Cloud Functions and be sure that it is private and secure. Not to forget you can always change it without having to ship an updated version of your mobile app!

## What to expect

This workshop will walk you through how to set up Cloud Functions, test them and deploy them 🚀. You will learn about the benefits of using them, the step-by-step of calling these functions from other Firebase products and how to use them in your iOS and Android apps.

You will get hands-on experience by implementing Cloud Functions for a sample app that we provide. In particular, you will:
* Write a Cloud Function that summarises articles using GPT-3
* Write a Cloud Function that categorises an article using the Google Cloud Natural Language API
* Write a Cloud Function to invite a new user to a shared resource
* Write a Cloud Function that sends an end-of-the-year “wrapped” summary to all users
* Test these Cloud Functions
* Deploy these Cloud Functions
*Use these Functions inside an iOS and Android app
* Create Firebase Extension to distribute some of the above functionality to other developers

## What you will take home

By the end of this workshop, you’ll have an understanding of how Cloud Functions work and how you can take advantage of them for your specific use cases. Next time you come across a situation where you wished there was a backend code somewhere taking care of this for you, you can be your own saviour and do it yourself.