Using FCM without a custom server?

[Manuel Maccou]

I've hired a freelancer to build the first iteration of my app using firebase. I'm non-technical, but am trying to learn as much as possible about firestore/firebase so that I can make updates in future iterations. Regarding notifications and analytics...ideally, I would like to use FCM so I can track notification analytics such as notifications opens and actions after the user opened the app. The freelancer I hired said that is not possible without having a custom server built with PHP, NodeJS, etc. I just wanted to confirm this with the firebase community. Is a custom server required to use FCM?

[Kato Richardson]

Hi Manuel,

If you only plan to send bulk messages to your audiences--e.g. promotions or engagement campaigns--you can compose and send them entirely in the Firebase admin console and without a custom server.

However, if you plan to send any sort of transactional messages, such as notifying a user when a friend signs in or when a new message arrives, these require a server side component to manage your admin API keys and credentials and actually send the request to FCM's APIs--documented here. Our currently supported server SDKs are Node, Java, Python, Go, and C#--note that PHP isn't in that list although you can get things running with PHP through our HTTP REST endpoints if needed.

One alternative to maintaining your own server is to send messages using Cloud Functions triggers. This means you just need to write and deploy a minimal Node script. I'd recommend evaluating this when working small development teams and third party developers, since you aren't tied to server maintenance with this approach (Google manages the server and scale).

☼, Kato

On Fri, Aug 16, 2019 at 4:38 PM Manuel Maccou <m.ma...@gmail.com> wrote:

I've hired a freelancer to build the first iteration of my app using firebase. I'm non-technical, but am trying to learn as much as possible about firestore/firebase so that I can make updates in future iterations. Regarding notifications and analytics...ideally, I would like to use FCM so I can track notification analytics such as notifications opens and actions after the user opened the app. The freelancer I hired said that is not possible without having a custom server built with PHP, NodeJS, etc. I just wanted to confirm this with the firebase community. Is a custom server required to use FCM?

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[Manuel Maccou]

Hi Kato thanks for the response! The notifications are based on user location and have to follow a few certain rules and logic before they are sent. Some of that logic is stored on the users device. I'll look into cloud functions and see if that could work given that some logic is on the users device

[Kato Richardson]

If the information is on user devices, then the devices can subscribe and unsubscribe to topics to basically join or leave notification groups. A lot depends on your use case of course.

☼, Kato 

On Mon, Aug 19, 2019 at 3:47 PM Manuel Maccou <m.ma...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Kato thanks for the response! The notifications are based on user location and have to follow a few certain rules and logic before they are sent. Some of that logic is stored on the users device. I'll look into cloud functions and see if that could work given that some logic is on the users device

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