Does FCM send push notification dicrectly or it sends message to APNS?

Question

As per the Apple documentation, every push notification always traverse through the APNS server. I have heard somewhere that FCM directly sends push notification directly to the device i.e. without contacting to the APNS server.

If ultimately APNS is responsible to send push notification, then why we should use FCM for iOS ?

Answer 1

The idea behind using Firebase Cloud Messaging to deliver push notifications to both Android and iOS devices is that implementing one server-side interface that sends all your push notifications (regardless of the platform) to one end-point should require less effort than implementing 2 server-side interfaces each sending to a different end-point and implementing a different API.

This is true regardless of whether or not FCM forwards the iOS messages to APNS or delivers them directly to the iOS devices.