I just started using Upnote. I noticed that if I add an new image or web clip on Mac, they appear almost instantaneously on my iPad and vice versa. According to Upnote, the data is store in Firebase. Just wondering why the speed is so different compares to iCloud?
Only Apple knows the “why”. iCloud seems to have a mind of its own and is impossible to bend to our will. I’m told there are lots of un-happy Apple app developers on their forums discussing and surely complaining.
I find all the other sync services I use are quicker than iCloud to react to change and then launch a sync to their servers. Dropbox, Google, Synology, and others that don’t come to mind right now. I never heard of Firebase.
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Firebase runs atop a content delivery network (CDN), Fastly, which lives up to its name. 
Firebase also is optimized for speed in ways that iCloud apparently is not.
Firebase is a Google product that started life as a hosted cloud database, but seems to have grown into more of an app development environment with apis to more Google offerings. It’s not equivalent to iCloud, Dropbox or any of the other file sync/ storage mechanisms in that it needs to be baked into the back end of a application. That’s not to say that someone might not have / couldn’t build a Finder like app that uses Firebase instead of your local disk.
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