Inventory & cloud synchronization

One account, every device

A user’s inventory lives in their TigerSystem account, backed by plain Firebase (Auth + Firestore) — deliberately unbranded infrastructure whose job is simple: one shared database, in one place, so every element of the sandbox (desktop, mobile, scale, web) interoperates on the same data. Every client — mobile, desktop, web — subscribes to the same documents in real time:

sequenceDiagram
  participant Phone as Tiger NFC Connect
  participant Cloud as Firebase (Firestore)
  participant Desktop as Tiger Studio
  Phone->>Cloud: scan chip → upsert spool
  Cloud-->>Desktop: real-time snapshot (instant)
  Desktop->>Cloud: update weight from TigerScale
  Cloud-->>Phone: real-time snapshot (instant)

There is no “sync button”: changes propagate through Firestore’s live listeners, and clients keep a local cache for offline reads.

What synchronizes

• Inventory — one document per spool (identity, weight, container, image…).
• Racks — physical shelf layouts and spool placement.
• Friends & sharing — friend links, incoming requests, notifications.
• Preferences — language, per-account settings.
• Chip backups — TigerTag+ chip records.

The authoritative field-by-field data model is documented in the Firebase integration repo (docs/03-data-model.md) — the reference for third-party integrators.

Sharing model (summary)

• Each user has a public discovery code (XXX-XXX) for O(1) friend lookup.
• Friendship is bidirectional and consent-based: request → accept; either side can remove it. Read access to a friend’s inventory is enforced server-side by Firestore security rules — never by the client.
• An inventory can also be flagged public, or shared as a read-only web list via TigerHub links.

Security model (summary)

• All per-user data is owner-only by default; cross-user access always requires a prior relationship (friendship, request), enforced by server-side rules.
• The Firebase project config is intentionally public (standard pattern); security lives in the rules, not in secrecy. See Cloud API & integration.

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Related: TigerHub, Developers — Cloud API