Evidence of Learning #5

Date:​ April 3, 2020

Subject:​ Android Application Development using Firebase

Citation:
Building an Android app with Google's Firebase
(citation generation for a youtube video)

Analysis:
This video, by TouchLab studios, is a thorough, step-by-step, instruction set to
developing an application in Android Studio that utilizes the online database of Google Firebase.
The video begins by discussing the features Firebase offers, which include Realtime Database,
Static Hosting, and User Authentication. The speaker continues by explaining how Firebase is
essential for product development, as it allows for the storage of data from different devices. In
other words, if the user stores passwords on their password vault phone application, they could
log in to the password vault website on their laptop and still access all their passwords. This
feature is commonplace today, but without cloud storage like Firebase, it isn’t possible to have
such cross-platform compatibility. After this, the speaker introduces Android Studio as the IDE
he will be utilizing to code the application. He also shows the seamless process by which you can
integrate Firebase into the application. Then the video becomes a demonstration of how
integrated Android Studio and Firebase are, as Firebase gives a clear output and stores with its
own URL as soon as you run the program on Android Studio. Additionally, the speaker
demonstrates the usefulness of Firebase’s Android Studio emulator. This emulator shows exactly
how the application will look on a device, which is an essential tool in application development.
For the remainder of the video, the speaker develops his chatting, Nanochat application.

This video was a great introduction to the essential tools in application development.
Firstly, from my individual research, I was under the impression that Firebase was an optional
tool that would just improve the real-world functionality of application. Although this is true,
Firebase also offers many other essential tools, like the Android Studio emulator, that makes
application development significantly less cumbersome, as this tool allows you to see how the
application looks as soon as you code it. Additionally, through the use of the Real-Time
Database, my password vault can be become cross-platform compatible, as this will allow users
data to be stored in servers, meaning they can access it from anywhere, not just the application.
Furthermore, this video introduced me to Firebase’s user authentication, which essentially
utilizes Google Account sign in to log into the application. In other words, rather than creating a
separate account, you can also choose to use your google account to create an account for the
password vault. This makes application use even easier, as users can simply log in with their
Google account to log into their account. Moreover, Firebase uses its own encryption method to
secure the password, which maintains a high level of security for the application. Lastly, this
video also provided a tutorial on implementing Firebase into Android Studio, which I was able to
follow to successfully implement Firebase into my own application.

Overall, this video was very informative. Even though the coding portion of the video
was fairly irrelevant in terms of my original work, the clear explanations of Firebase and
Android Studio made these tools easy to understand and even implement into my original work.
Moreover, this video allowed me to transition into the application development portion of my
original work. I look forward to continuing to use online resources to learn new topics that will
ultimately allow me to develop the highest quality application possible.