The future of the Firebase Admin PHP SDK
The SDK has nearly 2,000 Stars on GitHub, is included in more than 6,000 GitHub repositories, and is downloaded more than 450,000 times per month and counting. Integrations for Laravel and Symfony increase these numbers. If a PHP project uses Firebase, there's a good chance it's using this SDK.
The high number of downloads is a clear sign that the SDK is used in many CI/CD pipeline runs, indicating that a large number of enterprise and agency users rely on it to sustain their business. They use the SDK for free while making money from it - however, none of them have provided funding for me, the developer of the SDK.
Over the last 8+ years, I've spent thousands of hours maintaining and developing the SDK, keeping up with new features and changes to Firebase Services, providing support to users of the SDK and integrations (here and on StackOverflow, and making significant contributions to the official Google PHP libraries, so that not only SDK users can use up-to-date dependencies in their projects.
I have plans to improve and expand the SDK, such as adding better support for using multiple Firebase projects, tests without an integration environment, integrating Firebase's ML capabilities. Also, as I added more features while trying to keep the breaking changes at a minimum, there are many opportunities to improve the code base in general; but I hope you can understand that the current situation is very frustrating and feels increasingly unsustainable to me.
If the SDK is valuable to you and you would like to help change the situation, please contact me at _funding@jerome.gamez.name_ to discuss.