Question about the future plans/maintenance of angularFire

[LanderBeeuwsaert]

Let me open with that I've enjoyed working with firebase, Angular and AngularFire over the last years very much.
And, that I'm very grateful for the effort and love that has been put in the angularFire library.

However, considering the open issue #3406 , which makes that angularFire is forcing us to remain on firebase-js-sdk 9.22.2; which puts us 5 months behind on releases.
Considering the fact that there have been no significant updates to the library nor the documentation; it would be nice to get an update on the plans related to AngularFire.

It seems that the library authors have not had the time/possibility/desire to work on AngularFire and that nobody in the community has been stepping up to fill that void.
Sad how that may be, because we love the library, it would be nice to know what the plans are (if any) going forward.

Of course it would be great if we get to hear that in the foreseeable future somebody will (be able to) invest time in the library.
However a "Sadly no, we are not sure/cannot promise that effort will be put in the library in the (foreseeable) future" would also be better than what we have now.
Because at least then we would know where we stand and we would know we have to plan the investment of moving away from the library.

Best regards

[google-oss-bot]

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[jamesdaniels]

Hey there, sorry we've been in a bit of a rough shape lately. I actually just got back from paternity leave, so hoping to get things back in shape now that I've returned. v16 should be out the door tomorrow with v17 RC shortly after.

[LanderBeeuwsaert]

Hi James, that's great to hear.
And congratulations on the newborn!

I was a bit hesitating for putting the question out there that I would get thumbed down but am happy to see that I was not the only one it seems with this question.
Thanks for the response, and here's us with fingers crossed!

[rubenheymans]

I think the main problem is that Google sees this as a third party library and doesn't really give a shit about it (well it sometimes feels this way). How can we push Google to assign more resources to this? So James and the others get more help.

[LanderBeeuwsaert]

If I'm interpreting correctly, this library has started as a third party library and is continuing in that way (until now anyway).
To a degree it's a gray zone as the authors of the library are affiliated with google/firebase so I guess it's a sort of best effort + passion project.

However, my gripe would be that until yesterday, the library was promoted as "The official Angular library for Firebase".
https://github.com/angular/angularfire/blob/e04cd7ff2a61a33a9d18904afc439568cf877508/README.md?plain=1
And as a company we committed to it based on that description.
"Official" meaning we understood we had a degree of certainty that it would be kept up to date and would continue to be supported.
I'm sure that at the start this was the intention, but this has not been the case for a long time.
We're stuck with the decision we took at that time barring a big refactor.

Anyway, I'm glad that what has become a misleading statement has been removed and the library doesn't pretend to be anymore something which it is not.
However as a company we continue to struggle with the question considering the spotty maintenance in how far we should contemplate moving away.
In that way I agree that it would be helpful for the library authors, or, considering their affiliation with firebase, the firebase project itself to give a more official statement concerning future support.

[rubenheymans]

It would be nice if all the firebase docs also included the AngularFire examples, but that's probably just a dream:

[rubenheymans]

maybe it helps if we all submit this form to firebase? or is that just spamming?
https://firebase.google.com/support/troubleshooter/report/features

EDIT: They responded:

Hi Ruben,

Thank you for sharing this feedback with us.

I truly understand the current dilemma right now for most developers regarding Firebase not officially supporting yet the AngularFire framework, and the possibility that their current plugins may not be fully aligned with our up-to-date version of our Firebase SDKs.

The current state of AngularFire right now being a third party framework is due to the fact that its libraries and resources are maintained by a third party developer group. Troubleshooting any issues or rolling out bug fixes related to AngularFire are being done by the developers there. Right now, this is the only official GitHub repository of the AngularFire development group that maintains this library. If you have any feedback or bug report directly on the AngularFire library, filing an issue in this tracker is the only way to go.

While we're not limiting the developers from using third party integrations like AngularFire, internal discussions toward our goal to officially support Firebase + Angular integration are still ongoing. I'd love to say more about this, but unfortunately, we don't have much information or timeline to share that would guarantee its release in the near future.

As an action item here, I'll be linking your ticket in our internal feature request discussion so that your feedback may serve as an upvote in hopes that we could get Firebase + Angular officially supported in the future. I truly appreciate your honest opinion on the way AngularFire stands right now and I want to let you know that your feedback here is something we truly value.

Let me know if there's anything else I can help you with.

Thanks,
Kyle

[rubenheymans]

you can vote here if you like: https://firebase.uservoice.com/forums/948424-general/suggestions/47440403-make-angularfire-an-offcially-supported-library