[whatthemick]

You need to consider how much of your app needs to be realtime.

Do likes, comments, whatever absolutely need to be updated in realtime? If they do, you should consider going with a full realtime service. If not, i would go with a backend that you feel comfortable with and build realtime where you need it.

I'm building a Ionic (AngularJS) based mobile-app aswell and went with Firebase for full realtime, but in hindsight i would probably have had a better go with using a RDBMS on the backend (which i'm way more comfortable with) and used Socket.io or similar for the parts that really needed realtime.