How do I create a leaderboard within app

how do I create a leaderboard view , could I use firebase which I’m not familiar with . it would need to be a leaderboard that other user can join using leaderboard name and password- the leaderboard would display users within the leaderboard in order of rank along with their user name because of the achievements made in the app where these ranks are acquired

Hi Stephen,

Yes you could but you have quite a learning curve ahead of you to become familiar with Firebase.

That’s easy enough to do with Firebase Authentication where users can sign in (existing users) or sign up (new users).
You could store and/or update the users rank in a database collection (table) which could store the users username and their current score.

Like I said, you have a steep learning curve ahead of you but that’s pretty normal in iOS Development.

Or the best way to do this is integrating with Game Center

So you recommend firebase, I’m efficient at the front end concepts and I am now finalising the bank end for an app that needs a leaderboard data storage, username, password, email address etc, I have been working on for the past year. I have heard people recommend Mongodb, realm, and others is Firebase my best option

Really why would you recommend this over firebase out of curiosity ?

Firebase is one that I have used a lot so it’s very familiar to me. MongoDb and Realm are two that I am not familiar with. It’s not to say that either MongDb and Realm are any less of a solution but you would have to come up with your own authentication process in each of those two whereas Firebase already has that in place and it’s easy to integrate… well easy when you understand how to set it up.

Your choice.

It’s literally what it’s for, GameCenter is for a leaderboard and tracking achievements

It’s first party by Apple, no 3rd party authentication needed, users just use their Apple ID

It really depends on what you want, any solution technically works.

Thank you Chris I have one more question if you could answer it. Ive looked at videos with Chris on cocoapods as a dependency package to centralise or manage firebase however, he has videos on YouTube now saying from a 1year ago might I add on Swift package manager. Im using Xcode 14.3 on a MacBook Air and I cant download/install cocoa pods in my terminal . Im wondering if you could give me a quick explanation. Do I use Swift package manager instead or what do you recommend I don’t want to link my app bundle to project in firebase until I know what to do on that field.

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Yes, installing cocoapods is difficult these days on an M1 or M2 chipped Mac. But in any case the preferred method of installing 3rd party frameworks is using Swift Package Manager.

Chris Ching published a video on YouTube on how to do that:

This one is related to installing Firebase so it’s perfect to get you on the way.

and its safe to go ahead with that process as your starting point as in just get stuck in and learn as you go or experiment ? im trying to do this all fast without errors

Don’t be afraid of making a mistake. That’s all part of the learning process. Using SPM is so much easier than using cocoapods anyway so it’s a no brainer.