Firebase Cloud Firestore unavailable in asia-south1 (Mumbai)?

Question

I created my new Google Cloud project in Mumbai region because a majority of my users are in India for this project. This is a port of an existing project where I've been happily using Cloud Firestore before, for a small part of functionality. While not critical to main features of my project it is still pretty important.

However, when I try to provision a Cloud Firestore project in my Firebase console, it shows me this error:

Cannot enable Firestore for this project Currently Firestore cannot be enabled in this project's region

I'd much rather have the project hosted in asia-south1 because all of the content in this project is Indian language and people focused. Does anybody know of any way to make this work? I've got an Android app in the project that uses quite a few Firebase features, including Cloud functions, RTDB, Auth, and so on through the google-services.json mechanism. I'd use the RTDB for this feature as well, but the schema and requirements are much better suited to the new firestore.

Current alternatives I'm considering:

1. Create a separate firebase project just for cloud firestore and attempt to configure multiple projects in my Android app
2. Recreate all the projects in us-central and give up on using the mumbai region (even though it is super fast for my users)
3. Give up on using Cloud Firestore and make a separate API somewhere else for the feature

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Answer 1

I opened up a ticket with Firebase support, to which they responded with an "It's only available in the regions that it's available in, right now" kind of answer. And no, they don't have a committable timeline to when it will become available.

So we went with alternative #1. I made a "companion" firestore project in the US region, and figured out how to use 2 firebase projects for this in the Android app. When Firestore comes out of beta (soon, hopefully?) we'll add Firestore to the South-1 region and copy the data over.