Can we run firebase realtime listening on ios serviceworker?

Question

As of iOS 11.3 there is serviceworker feature supported

Even though it has no support for notification. I wonder if it possible to just run any realtime listener, such as firebase database, to receive realtime data and use ServiceWorkerRegistration.showNotification to show local notification instead

Is it possible?

Answer 1

While iOS don't support Web Push notifications yet(as of Apr-2018), all you can do is have an event listener for data from server side(Firebase in your case) and receive that data to show it as an Notification/alert or how ever you want to present inside your application(not in iOS notification area).

Unfortunately, this is the best way you can handle notifications for iOS. I know, its not so great for developers :) Hope Apple speeds up on PWA. They are more than a year late to Service worker party itself. What to expect!

Update : One more link on WhatWebCanDo.today and one from Apple which says iOS-Safari don’t support push notification as a web standard defined by w3c. But looks like there is a OS X safari proprietary solution available.

Answer 2

Unfortunately not, while Safari on native IOS is getting closer to the functionality we see in chrome, firefox etc. we currently ( as of this comment ) do not have anyway of sending push notifications on native IOS Safari ( or any other ios browser like chrome etc. ).

Safari for mac uses a custom mac solution for these notifications which you can check out here https://developer.apple.com/notifications/safari-push-notifications/.