Firebase chat Push Notifications

Question

I am developing a chat app using Firebase as backend. It is required that on every new message receiver gets a push notification saying that he got a new message. This is first time I am doing something like this so I have a question:

Since we do not use our own server for this, do we need a 3rd party provider (like Batch for example) for handling push notifications? If I am not mistaken I think Firebase does not support sending push notifications like this but only ones you send from console.

Any help would be great.

Answer 1

Hope someone finds this useful, it helped in my case.

Currently sending push notifications from device to device isn't possible with solution Firebase offers. If you want that type of thing, you should try OneSignal which is free and very easy to implement.

Answer 2

(iOS) A little late; but perhaps can help anyone in the future with this.

I recently had this issue, and my solution was to utilize the device group method.

Ergo:

1. Would create a device group with the registration_ids (or array of device ids for the push)

2. Would then send the push to said device group

3. Delete device group

See: https://firebase.google.com/docs/cloud-messaging/ios/device-group