Thanks for the comment throwaway!

Our view is that the main reason Parse and Firebase didn't manage to gain mainstream adoption is that they were too limited. At the time, limitations imposed by available infrastructure forced them to to adopt a nosql model that made it very hard to implement advanced business logic. We have come a long way since then, but unfortunately Firebase is still stuck with the same fundamental data structure.

Here are some good resources on this topic:

https://www.graph.cool/docs/tutorials/graphql-vs-firebase-ch... https://medium.freecodecamp.com/firebase-the-great-the-meh-a...

Yeah it's a new word for an old thing - I think "hosted" is often a better word.