Scrapping Big Brother

 I have started to build my own services to replace Google’s Firebase in my applications.  There is just so much Open Source out there that it only makes sense to not contribute to the collection of people’s personal data.  And there’s the fact that for 99% of my tasks I really don’t need to know anything about a user and they certainly don’t need a login.

 The first thing I have done is to create a simple web socket service using Ratchet and PHP.  It’s REALLY simple, basically it replaces the chat in my GhostTalk app.  The device connects to the web socket, increments the user count.  The user sends a message which contains their app generated ID (Apple requires that users have the ability to block each other) and the web socket sends the message to all connected devices.  The device disconnects when the app goes to the background or exits and the service decrements the user count.

 That’s basically all it does!  Now the chat is super fast, no delays in posting, no duplicate messages, no weird login delay for some users.  All of the crap of Google’s overloaded real time database service has been removed.  Next step would be to add an analytics tool to give me a page where I can see how many users are in each app, what the average daily use is, how many new users an app has, etc.  Analytics tools are easily available so this should be nothing to install.  If you are looking to bring your analytics in house, take a look at Matomo, it’s an open source tool that can replace Google Analytics for you and simplify your privacy policy.