I am trying to develop the Messenger App like Whatsapp using Firebase.
I'm already done the code for device to device notifications and now I am trying to send the notifications to specified group.
Please provide the example code for the Group Notifications.
There are a few ways to send messages to groups of users:
Send the message to a topic that all users subscribe to. This is the simplest scenario, since you don't need to keep a list of tokens. But you have less control over the actual people that receive the message, as anyone who knows a topic can subscribe to it.
Keep a list of device tokens for each group in your app server, and then send to each individual device in the group.
You can also use the previous version of the API to send to batches of up to 500 tokens at a time. This sort of multicast delivery is not yet possible in the new API.
For an example of this, see the documentation of Cloud Functions and the sample repo.
Send to a device group with the legacy API. I'd only recommend this approach if the devices are actually owned by one user, which is the case that device groups are meant for.
Try this link
Don't forget this line Authentication:
key=<Your_API_Key>
The word (key) is important
Related
I am developing an Android app, which deals with allocating orders to multiple suppliers. Each supplier will have the same Android app installed. Every day, the in charge of the suppliers will open the app, pick up the suppliers to assign from the recyclerview and enter a customised message on the days' supply in an editText.
The message should be delivered in form of push notification to other suppliers he has selected from the recyclerview. So, in this case I cannot use Firebase console to send notifications. I initially thought of using Twilio to do this. But my client wanted to keep this as last option. They want me to try Push notifications.
I am researching, but every one is illustrating on how the notification can be sent through Firebase console. I also heard that GCM is obsolete now.
Please can anyone give me some pointers on how this can be done? Please note that I am a beginner in Android.
I think you can use firebase cloud messaging to achieve this. See FCM documentation.
You can send a push notification through firebase by using firebase HTTP protocol instead of the firebase console. In this way, you can programmatically send a push notification by making a REST call.
There are 2 firebase HTTP protocols that you may use to achieve this:
Legacy protocol:
This is the older firebase HTTP protocol. This is easier to set up and you can find a lot of material online explaining how to use this like medium article.
New protocol(HTTP V1):
This is the newer HTTP protocol. This is a little more difficult as authentication is done by oAuth token. However, this is more secure and extensible. Also, it seems like firebase might eventually deprecate the legacy API.
Hence, in your app, once the in charge of suppliers assigns the duties, you can call the firebase APIs to send out push notifications to all the assigned suppliers.
I am new with FCM and I am still discovering its possibilities.
I wonder if it is the right tools to do what I want:
I would like to send a notification to all my users, to inform them about new informations for example.
The difficulty is that I want to target all the users of different apps (like 10 apps), and some of them may have more than one of my app installed.
So I do not want a user to have the same notification displayed multiple times (if he installed more than one of my app).
Is it something possible with Firebase?
Thank you
Yes you can! To achieve this, i recomand you using Google Cloud Messaging not FCM. which it's an earlier version. Here is a tutorial on how you can migrate from FCM to GCM.
To achieve this, all your 10 apps must use Firebase and all your users must be Firebase registered users. To send a notification to all devices, would mean then to select all the registration ids from that database, add them in an array and pass them further to GCM.
Note also, that strating with GCM 3.0 it's now possible to send a notification to all devices thanks to topics support. The app must suscribe to one or more topics and the server can send notifications to that topic without specifying individual devices. You can see here Topic Messaging.
Unfortunately, there is no way in which, with a single line of code, to send a notification to all of your users from all your apps. You can only send a notification to all your users that belong only to a single app. If you want that all of yours to get the same message, then you need to consider sending that particular message again, to all users that belong to each app. In this case, if a users is using more then one of your apps, will receieve that message for each app separately.
I am working on an app, which requires Android push notifications to be implemented.
I have decided to use Firebase Cloud Messaging directly; without using any other abstraction such as AWS SNS or Pusher.
I would like to avoid storing and managing device tokens in the backend, by using the following approach.
In the android app.
When the user logs into the android application, obtain device token but not send it to the server.
Subscribe to a topic that is based on a agreed convention, such that the topic is unique to that user.
On logout unsubscribe from the topic.
In the Server.
Whenever a situation arises to send a notification to particular user, send push notification to the topic, that is based on the convention.
I would like to know if this is a viable strategy to avoid managing device tokens ?
Case against using topics.
From the official docs.
Based on the publish/subscribe model, FCM topic messaging allows you to send a message to multiple devices that have opted in to a particular topic. You compose topic messages as needed, and FCM handles routing and delivering the message reliably to the right devices.
For example, users of a local weather forecasting app could opt in to a "severe weather alerts" topic and receive notifications of storms threatening specified areas. Users of a sports app could subscribe to automatic updates in live game scores for their favorite teams.
I see that topics are recommended, when multiple devices are to be notified. But I have decided to create a topic per user, this would mean most topics would end up getting subscribed by only one device; Is this approach ok ?
I see that topics are recommended, when multiple devices are to be notified
Yes, multiple devices that have something common to listen to, which is the topic. Topics are used for messages that could be received by the general clients since it is public -- i.e. anyone could subscribe and receive messages sent to it.
What is advised to use for multiple devices, but for the same user is to use Device Groups (see my answer here for tips on Managing Device Groups). However, if you don't mind the "topics being public" part, then your approach should be fine.
Yes, Here required device tokens if we want to send push notification whoever installed your app.
My research we can save device tokens in back end at first time installation of your app that is better according to my understanding so that we can easy to send push notification across all devices.
I am new to gcm api for android and have for some time now i have being working on an android app to allow chatting between two users of the app. The app is such that a chat can only be initiated when one user opts to contact the other user. But my confusion comes in the manner i would be able to create a chatroom for these two users and for the other user to be able receive messages. since i found out that each user must subscribe to a topic inorder to receive messages in that topic. Would i have to subscribe all users to all possible topics or what? that is my big question but it seems it would have so much overhead considering i have 1000+ users.
Please i need all the help i can get here. Thanks
Would i have to subscribe all users to all possible topics or what?
GCM topic messaging allows your app server to send a message to multiple devices that have opted in to a particular topic.
It is not a requirement but it can ease the work for the server to send messages. In this tutorial, you will see that they have created a chat like environment using GCM without using the topic function.
BUT consider the effects on your server like how will it behave on the potential load when you use the topic messaging, especially the the message will trigger an interaction from the user to the server.
I have one single Gmail account signed up for C2DM.
What I would like is that my app, thanks to this account (after having requested registration IDs and auth tokens for each device), could be able to provide messages to all the devices in which the app is installed.
I want to know if is it possible to use the C2DM in this way..
Thanks a lot
(for any details, just ask me.. )
ps I made the c2dm work on the emulator, but of course I cannot try what written before because I would need several phones..
Going off your question and comments, it sounds like you're just wondering if you can send c2dm notifications to an indeterminate number of devices using only one sender id.
That is exactly the way c2dm is supposed to work. You create one sender id to use on your backend servers, and that sender id is used in your app to register for c2dm notifications. Your backend then gathers all registrations ids and uses your one sender id to push notifications interested parties.
If I understood your issue correctly, the answer is: you can't.
You will have to send one http request, to google servers, for each device you want to reach.
There's no way to broadcast a message to all the users who have registered to your service.
It' frustrating because in my case I send a newsletter for all my users, so opening a connection to millions of users is expensive.
To solve the scalability issue I have created a simple appengine map-reduce task that loops through all the user registrations and create the http connection to the google services, it's the fastest you can go because it dynamically instantiate new servers for your delivery needs.
C2DM has been deprecated. GCM has replaced it, and it allows you to send messages to 1000 devices with one HTTP POST.
C2DM->GCM Migration Guide:
http://developer.android.com/guide/google/gcm/c2dm.html