What's Next?

Now that we've walked through the tutorial, let's talk about what you can do next.

In this tutorial, we implemented the push notification feature to manually send messages to a fixed user from the developer portal. In actual applications, you will want to customize how the target users are to be managed and how the push messages are to be sent. You will also need to consider the state of the application (e.g., when the application is not active). This page covers how to handle these issues.

User management

In Kii Cloud, the destination of push messages is always a Kii Cloud user, not a device.

The user is also used to determine the scope of data in Kii Cloud. As explained in Managing Users, the user management is virtually required for all applications.

There are several ways to manage users:

• By explicitly specifying username and password

  In this method, a user is registered with their id (username, email address, or phone number) and password. The user account information is to be explicitly specified by the end user.

• By using a pseudo user

  In this method, a Kii Cloud user is created without any explicit user registration. The access token will be used to distinguish users. This method will allow you to automatically create a user who is bound to a specific device.

For more information about the user, see Registering and Logging in a User.

How to send push messages

In Kii Cloud, there are three types of push notifications:

• Push to App notification

  This method will automatically send a push notification when the data in a bucket is changed.

• Push to User notification

  This method will allow you to send a push message to all users who have subscribed to a topic. A message sent to the topic will be delivered to all subscribers.

• Direct Push notification

  This method will allow the app admin to send a push message to a specific user from the developer portal.

In the tutorial, we used the Direct Push notification. Probably the most flexible method is the Push to User notification, so consider using this method when you implement your application.

See Managing Push Notifications for the overview of the push notification in general.

The push notification feature of Kii Cloud is mainly designed for device-to-device notification. It is not optimized to broadcast messages to numerous users (e.g., simultaneously delivering marketing ads). You might not be able to get the expected performance if you use the feature in such a way.