Managing Push Notifications

Kii Cloud supports the following push notification technologies:

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

Kii Cloud SDK for iOS supports APNs. For combining it with push notifications through FCM and MQTT, see the push notification topics for Android and 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 in your mobile app:

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

   • Overview of the Push Technology for iOS: This topic provides technical information about the push notification network to the extent required for integrating with Kii Cloud.
   • Overview of the Kii Cloud Push Notification: This topic outlines how Kii Cloud delivers push notifications and supported features.

2. Take the push notification tutorial as described in Enabling the Kii Push Notification Feature to add the push notification feature to your mobile app.

   In the tutorial, you build a mobile app for testing and check how the feature works. The outcome of the tutorial can be used as a skeleton of your mobile app.

3. Make necessary customization to the initialization process and the reception handler as described in Implementing the Initialization and Reception Processes.

4. Implement functions to send and receive 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.