Is it possible to implement custom push notifications for mobile without the use of Firebase?

Question

I am writing a mobile application in Flutter, which is Google's SDK for developing mobile apps.

Basically, I was researching into how to mobile push notifications and every source I could find would point me in the direction of Firebase, which is Google's mobile and web application platform. Firebase is extremely nice and makes it really easy to send push notifications from user to user, but I would like to learn how to do it myself and I can not find documentation to do that.

All I could find was creating a Dart Isolate in the background of my application to solely listen for incoming notifications. The Firebase plugin for Dart, from what I can gather, does just that; creates an Isolate to listen for notifications, even when the app is closed/user has killed the app.

So my main question is, is it possible to create an Isolate in the background to keep a WebSocket connection alive at all times that would listen for data from a server, and then push that data to the screen in the form of a notification without the use of Firebase? (I have created a server in Node.js, and it would be cool if I could just handle all notifications from my Node server). Thanks!

Solution

Of course you can implement push notifications without Firebase. Do a web search for “list of push notification services” and you’ll see lists of a variety of services out there. And, on the iOS side, you can have your web service interact directly with the APNs, and have no third party service (such as Firebase’s FCM) involved at all. On the Android side, though, FCM is probably still the logical choice. It’s easy, scalable, and is free.

I would not suggest trying to keep a socket connection alive at all times, though (if that’s what you’re contemplating). First, you won’t even be able to do that on the iOS side when the app is not active. Second, these push notification services are designed to solve the problem that web sockets introduce, namely the user device resource drain and the cost of maintaining a scalable server to maintain all of those connections.

Sure, use sockets where you need them (e.g. near-instantaneous communication while the app is active, etc.), but it’s not the right solution when the app is no longer active.

Comments

[Doug Stevenson]

Sure, give it a try.