Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) is a cross-platform messaging solution that lets you reliably send
messages at no cost.
Using FCM, you can notify a client app that new email or other data
is available to sync. You can send notification messages to drive user re-engagement and
retention. For use cases such as instant messaging, a message can transfer a
payload of up to 4096 bytes to a client app.
Send notification messages that are displayed to your user.
Or send data messages and determine completely what happens in
your application code. See
Message types.
Versatile message targeting
Distribute messages to your client app in any of 3 ways—to
single devices, to groups of devices, or to devices subscribed to topics.
How does it work?
An FCM implementation includes two main components for
sending and receiving:
A trusted environment such as Cloud Functions for Firebase or an app server
on which to build, target, and send messages.
An Apple, Android, or web (JavaScript) client app that receives
messages via the corresponding platform-specific transport service.
See the architectural
overview for more detail and important
information about the components of FCM.
Implementation path
Set up the FCM SDK
Set up Firebase and FCM on your app according to the
setup instructions for your platform.
Develop your client app
Add message handling, topic subscription logic, or other optional
features to your client app. During the development, you can easily
send test messages from
the Notifications composer.
Develop your app server
Decide whether you want to use the
Firebase Admin SDK or the server protocol to create your sending
logic—logic to authenticate, build send requests, handle responses, and
so on. Then build out the logic in your trusted environment.
Next steps
Run the Android
or iOS
Quickstart sample. These samples let you run and review code to send a test
message to a single device using the Firebase console.
Add Firebase Cloud Messaging to your
Android,
Apple,
or Web app.
Set up your trusted environment where you'll build and send message requests.
You can write sending logic using the
Admin SDK, and
readily deploy that code on Cloud Functions for Firebase or other cloud
environments managed by Google.
Alternatively, you can perform server development using the
FCM server protocol.