google sign-in without firebase

Question

I have seen many post about firebase with google sign-in. In google's tutorial for google sign-in for android project, it does not use firebase but on many post people use firebase with google sign-in. What is the advantage of using firebase and when and why we need to use it?

Answer 1

Authenticate users by integrating with federated identity providers. The Firebase Authentication SDK provides methods that allow users to sign in with their Google, Facebook, Twitter, and GitHub accounts.

With Firebase the users will be authenticated and you will have access to the firebase database/cloud functions and other services. So its better to use firebase with google sign in. Basically to make it easier for you after sign in.

Answer 2

Top two reasons for using Firebase:

1. You want your users to have option to login with any social media platform but do not want separate dashboards since its hard to get proper analytics.
2. Firebase has introduced something amazing called cloud functions which will allow to have your server side script to be hosted on Firebase. You would generally want the token given to you through authentication to be stored in your server and database. Firebase is now providing both so having everything in the same place does help. I basically brought down the release time for a decently complicated app from 14 days to 6 days using a combination of these two.