I am using FCM console to send push messages to the users. Until now I am targetting using User Segments through which I can filter users based on language. But now I need to allow users to subscribe or unsubscribe to the type of alerts they can receive. So I am exploring the option Topics. But now from firebase console I can either target users based on User Segments or Topics.
I want to be able to use Topics with the options I can get in User Segments(where I can filter based on language). Is there a way to make this possible?
Thanks,
Sindhu
Segments can't be targeted with topics. Segments are populated by data collected by Firebase Analytics, and don't identify individual devices. Topics are just names that you make up, and the names must match between the device and server.
You will need to find a way to match up users in a segment to the topic that you create for that segment. You could try to use Remote Config to give clients the name of a topic that matches their segment, then use FCM to subscribe to that topic.
Related
There are several ways to send FCM messages and I don't understand which one to use even if I read the documents over and over.
My use case:
I have a user that is logged into the app on her iPhone, iPad and Android tablet. I want to make sure the push notifications are sent to all of her devices.
There are three ways to do this (I'm using the admin to send the push notifications):
Topic messaging (messaging().sendToTopic): My understanding this is for sending the same notification to larger groups. For example a topic could be all users that want weather notifications for New York. Not for my use case.
Send Multicast (messaging().sendMulticast([array of tokens]): My understanding this will send the same message to all device tokens in the array (up to 100). This seems perfect for my use case, right?
Device group messaging (messaging().sendToDeviceGroup): I don't really understand this one. Why use this instead of multicast or topics?
For my use case it seems the best way is to each time a FCM token is updated I add this token to the user in the database. I then send the notification using the admin.messaging().sendMulticast([array of tokens]). Is this what you would recommend? Why or why not?
You probably want to use multicast if you're targeting an individual user's specific devices. You probably don't want to use device groups. I suggest reading the documentation to understand how device groups work:
Device group messaging allows you to add multiple devices to a single group. This is similar to topic messaging, but includes authentication to ensure that group membership is managed only by your servers. For example, if you want to send different messages to different phone models, your servers can add/remove registrations to the appropriate groups and send the appropriate message to each group. Device group messaging differs from topic messaging in that it involves managing device groups from your servers instead of directly within your application.
Device groups are basically just topics whose membership is fully managed by your server code, not by client code.
Seems like majority of solutions here require the developer to manually save each user's push token in addition to Firebase saving these tokens as well, then iterate through these and send out notifications. This is not really desirable since I would be storing push tokens in two separate places and need to make sure their lifecycle management is synchronized, which is error prone 😢Is there a better way?
Some options I considered:
Give each user a person/unique topic, then map out a geolocation per topic; then filter through these locations, aggregate these topics into batches of 500 and send a push. This is probably the best option so far 🤷♂️ but seems like a silly use of topics API.
Bucket users in cities, with each city corresponding to a topic; then find all cities near a location, and send a push to those topics. This is doable, but lots of complex city mapping code without much flexibility (vs. considering a simple radius).
Manually store push token → user → geolocation; filter out the ones you want, then send a push to the token specifically. This is problematic for many reasons (multiple device management, push token lifecycle management, data duplication, etc.)
Ideally, there is a way to send out a push notification to a list of user IDs, without even touching push tokens, is there a way to do this?
The only way to associate a device token to a user ID is to store that mapping yourself. You should also assume that one user could have multiple devices. FCM doesn't have a concept of a "user". It only knows device tokens. Your app has to bring the concept of a user, then map that to tokens in code.
Note that any messaging solution that requires topics is not "secure". Anyone can effectively receive messages from any topic.
I am looking into using Firebase Analytics for my apps. I'm curious:
What are the criteria for which retention is based on? Does retention track user accounts with a unique id that I'd have to send, or unique device?
How would I control for this if, say, a user logs into my app from multiple devices? I'd want to make sure a user's retention is applied from those multiple devices.
The Firebase SDK library uses an app-instance identifier to Identify a unique installation of the App. When using the SDK, an app-instance identifier gets generated at the app level (Source: https://support.google.com/firebase/answer/6318039?hl=en).
There is also a thing called User Properties that you can use to have a better understanding about unique users i.e. users that signed into your app (Source: https://firebase.google.com/docs/auth/users)
I have a server that needs to receive real time updates from Firebase, for multiple users, where each user grants Oauth access to his Firebase data to my app.
My server is implemented using Firebase REST Streaming, based on Server Sent Events.
I need to know if there is a way to multiplex Firebase data pertaining to multiple users on a single stream.
I would like to be able to set up the stream with Oauth tokens pertaining to multiple users, and to subsequently receive real time updates pertaining to the multiple users on the same stream.
Otherwise, it seems that I need to maintain a separate stream per Oauth token, which seems to be non-scalable.
I think Twitter have a Site Streams feature like what I am looking for in their API, implemented via an envelope that indicates the user the message is targetted to.
Does Firebase support anything similar?
A single Firebase REST call will only monitor a single node. E.g.
curl 'https://samplechat.firebaseio-demo.com/users/jack/name.json'
You can control what data is returned from under that node with the orderBy, startAt,endAtandlimitTo...` parameters. E.g.
curl 'https://samplechat.firebaseio-demo.com/users/.json?orderBy="name"&startAt="Jack"'
There is no way to have a single REST request return data from different nodes/nodesets. So unless you find a way to gather all data you want to return under single node, where it can be returned by a single set of query parameters (orderBy, etc), you will have to execute multiple REST requests to get your data.
Note that the SDKs that Firebase provides internally use a web-socket protocol, so are not impacted by this limitation. If an SDK is available for your server-side language (e.g. node.js, Java), you could solve it by using that one.
The Firebase chat application seems to suggest that all clients will receive the messages sent to a given FireBase url.
Now, one way of ensuring that users only receive messages sent to a specific channel is to filter messages at the client, but this would mean that all messages will be propagated to all clients and the client would do the filtering.
Is there any way to establish channels at the Firebase server - or does this mean that one would need to create separate firebases for separate channels, which would mean that if one wanted user-specific push-messages, it might require creating one channel/firebase for each user.
So, what is the suggested solution?
The Firebase Data Structure makes this quite easy, actually! The demo app puts the chat messages in the root of the Firebase (i.e. https://samplechat.firebaseio.com/), but you could just as easily use separate locations within your Firebase for separate chats, e.g. /chat1, /chat2, etc. Or better yet, you could have a /chats/ location with an arbitrary number of chats underneath, each named uniquely (possibly using push()).
Then a user could receive and push messages to a particular chat by referencing it directly (e.g. https://samplechat.firebaseio.com/chats/chat-id/) and then they won't get any data for any other chats.