<p>Over the last few weeks, I decided to migrate my two Expo apps from Supabase to Firebase.</p>
<p>Not because Supabase was bad — I’ve genuinely enjoyed using it — but I wanted to try something new and see how Firebase feels for React Native apps. Spoiler: it was smoother than I expected.</p>
<h3>🔄 Why I made the switch</h3>
<p>My Supabase setup worked fine for both TinyRecipe (a recipe &amp; pantry manager) and TinyDebt (a debt-tracking app).</p>
<p>But I wanted to:</p>
<ul>
<li>experiment with Firebase’s native SDKs</li>
<li>simplify auth and analytics setup</li>
<li>test Firestore’s real-time capabilities</li>
<li>get some hands-on experience for future projects</li>
</ul>
<h3>⚙️ How I integrated Firebase with Expo</h3>
<p>I used @react-native-firebase, and honestly, it was a breeze.</p>
<p>A few notes from the migration process:</p>
<ul>
<li>You can use it with Expo Dev Clients (bare workflow not required).</li>
<li>Setup was straightforward — I just had to update app credentials for both iOS and Android.</li>
<li>Firestore queries felt super responsive compared to my previous setup.</li>
<li>Firebase Authentication and Analytics required minimal config.</li>
</ul>
<p>What surprised me most was how much Expo has improved in working with native modules — it felt almost like using plain React Native.</p>
<h3>⚡ Lessons learned</h3>
<ul>
<li>Supabase is amazing for quick, SQL-based setups — Firebase shines for real-time updates and offline-ready data.</li>
<li>Migrating schemas was mostly painless thanks to Firestore’s flexible structure.</li>
<li>If you’re an Expo dev curious about Firebase, @react-native-firebase is worth exploring.</li>
</ul>
<h3>📱My apps</h3>
<p>🍱 TinyRecipe is live on:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://apps.apple.com/app/id6749379823" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">App Store</a></li>
<li><a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vladislavsiumbeli.foodable" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">Google Play</a></li>
</ul>
<p>💰 TinyDebt is live on:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://apps.apple.com/app/id6752252043" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">App Store</a></li>
<li><a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vladislavsiumbeli.tinydebt" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">Google Play</a></li>
</ul>
<h3>💬 Wrapping up</h3>
<p>This migration taught me a lot about how flexible Expo has become. It’s easier than ever to pick the tools that best fit your app — Supabase or Firebase, you can’t really go wrong.</p>
<p>If anyone else has switched between these two, I’d love to hear your experience!</p>


Vladislav Siumbeli

A developer shares their experience migrating two Expo apps (TinyRecipe and TinyDebt) from Supabase to Firebase. The migration used @react-native-firebase and worked smoothly with Expo Dev Clients without requiring bare workflow. Key takeaways include Firebase's strengths in real-time updates and offline capabilities, Firestore's responsive queries, and straightforward authentication and analytics setup. The author notes that Supabase excels for SQL-based setups while Firebase shines for real-time features, and emphasizes how Expo's improved native module support made the process easier than expected.

Migrating my Expo apps from Supabase to Firebase — what I learned

<p>Expo has really come a long way and has made cross platform development and integrations with 3rd party apps so much easier. You really can’t go wrong with expo.</p>


<p>This looks extremely AI generated, no offense though as it was a good post!</p>
<p>Also: Someone should make SupaFirebase 😀</p>


<p>To be honest, something is wrong if you decide to migrate from SQL to NoSQL DB just because you want to “try something new”. Is there any legitimate reason behind this migration? Was there anything wrong with Supabase? Or is this just an Ad disguised as a “technical post”?</p>


<p>Reason i chose firebase was out of box auth persistence.</p>


<p>It wasn’t that straightforward for me using expo build, took me some time to debug iOS build errors, I had to manually edit Podfile to fix it.</p>
