App Engine needs to be enabled to use Cloud Firestore

Question

Since I am not using the Google Cloud Platform App engine service anymore, I disabled it and got the following error on Firestore:

The workaround I could find is just to deploy a dummy app engine fully managed application. Still I think this should not be the right way of doing things.

Is there another way? Why did Google choose to link Firestore to App Engine?

Answer 1

firebaser here

Cloud Firestore is an evolution of Cloud Datastore, which in turn is the (originally unnamed) database in App Engine.

So it's not as much that Firebase chose to link Firestore to App Engine, as it is that we can't unlink it from App Engine without rewriting a lot of infrastructure. That may happen at some point, but at the moment you'll need to keep App Engine enabled to use Firestore.

By the way: this is also the reason that for a long time you could set a spending limit on Firestore, but not on other Firebase products: it inherited its spending limit from its App Engine lineage. When the ability to set a spending limit disappeared from App Engine, Firestore also lost that ability.