Managing Push Notifications

Kii Cloud supports the following push notification technologies:

• FCM (Firebase Cloud Messaging)
• APNs (Apple Push Notification service)
• MQTT

Though there is no Kii Cloud REST API to receive push notifications, you can send push notifications and process subscriptions with the REST APIs once you implement a process to receive push notifications in your mobile app for Android, iOS, or JavaScript. For the full list of available technologies per platform, see Push notification.

In this guide, a push notification service such as FCM and APNs is called a push notification network for convenience of explanation.

Push notification overview

Push notification is a feature for informing an event that occurs on the server to the client without any explicit checking request. The client can get the notifications passively rather than fetching them actively.

If your application were to receive server events without the push notification feature, the client would constantly access the server and check the status (ref. the figure on the left). Making this checking time interval big will cause some delay in getting the status while making it small will cause various issues like increasing server load, data traffic and device battery consumption.

You can solve this issue with the push notification feature. There are various methods to implement the feature and many implementations promptly notify clients of changes on the server at a low cost by keeping connections between the server and the clients.

Kii Cloud can send a push notification when a change in a bucket occurs, another client sends a message, and so on.

Implementation steps

Take the following steps to implement the push notification feature with the REST APIs:

1. Get the full picture of the related technologies by reading the following topics:

   • Overview of the Push Technology: Check information about FCM, APNs, or MQTT according to the push notification network for your mobile app.
   • Overview of the Kii Cloud Push Notification: This topic outlines how Kii Cloud delivers push notifications and supported features.

2. Implement a process to receive push notifications in your mobile app for Android, iOS, or JavaScript.

3. Implement functions to send push messages with the following three push notification features:

   • Push to App Notification: This feature lets your mobile app know when a new event occurred in your Kii Cloud application.
   • Push to User Notification: This feature lets you and your application users quickly send messages to other users.
   • Direct Push Notification: This feature lets you reach your application users directly.