In most Hackathons I have encountered, client/server interactions have become increasingly essential to woo a jury. The best way to quickly get a result over a weekend is to use Parse or Firebase. And hobbyists with some base knowledge can use it to build prototypes quickly.
Want to achieve the same result with Cloud Endpoints and an Android Client? You will need a couple of hours just to get the dev environment and skeleton code up and working to get started. Google has so many clever engineers, but the barrier of entry to their solutions isn't as low.
I think this is where the Firebase acquisition comes into play. It's a much lower barrier to entry to use the Google Cloud environment and is probably mostly a play against Facebook's acquisition of Parse than against Amazon.
Want to achieve the same result with Cloud Endpoints and an Android Client? You will need a couple of hours just to get the dev environment and skeleton code up and working to get started. Google has so many clever engineers, but the barrier of entry to their solutions isn't as low. I think this is where the Firebase acquisition comes into play. It's a much lower barrier to entry to use the Google Cloud environment and is probably mostly a play against Facebook's acquisition of Parse than against Amazon.