FR: RealtimeDatabase support for WatchOS

[n3at18]

Could you please add RealtimeDatabase support for WatchOS?
It's crucial because watch apps are independent now and we can't rely on "WatchConnectivity" due to it's limitations. Watch apps needs to get data from Firebase directly.
Thanks!

[kajensen]

Request for Firestore support is #4559

[mknippen]

+1 here. I opened #269 a few years back with this intention. This ticket is specifically for the real-time database

[schmidt-sebastian]

Please note that this is likely not something that we will officially support in the Realtime Database SDK. We do welcome community contributions though and can release this as an "unofficial" feature (similar to how we rolled out MacOS support).

[n3at18]

Please note that this is likely not something that we will officially support in the Realtime Database SDK. We do welcome community contributions though and can release this as an "unofficial" feature (similar to how we rolled out MacOS support).

Thanks for letting us know. Could you please clarify the reason? Are you going to stop supporting Realtime Database at all and we should migrate to Firestore ASAP or it's something else?

[paulb777]

@n3at18 To clarify, RTDB is the same as the rest of Firebase. Only iOS is officially supported. All other Apple platforms are community supported.

[ryanwilson]

And to expand a bit further... even though it's not "official", investigations and work are being done to support watchOS as the requests roll in. We prioritize the requests against other features and issues and make decisions based on that (things like thumbs up reactions on issues like this are a strong indicator for us that a feature is highly requested).

Work is definitely being done to support multiple Apple platforms (the vast majority of products do work on tvOS, macOS, and Catalyst already) but we can't give word on if/when individual platforms would become "officially" supported.

[schmidt-sebastian]

We love the RTDB as much as our customers and will continue to support it on all currently supported platforms.

[tysun]

One camp is saying it's not a great idea to try and communicate with Firebase directly from watchOS and it's better to prepare data in the iPhone app and pass it on to the watch using updateApplicationContext i.e. WatchConnectivity.

However the other camp is saying the use of WatchConnectivity places a lot of restrictions on the watch app (it can only get data from the phone when the phone app is running) so we should use the Firebase REST API directly from your watch app. If you choose to use the REST API, you don't need the watch app to communicate with the iPhone counterpart, the watch app can directly get the Firebase data using network requests. However, in this scenario, the network usage will be bigger.