APNS vs Firebase

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Notifications have become one of the most important things for today’s world. The world where we are all living at very fast-paced notifications makes it possible for us to stay up to date with all the important things, including news, social notifications, business tasks, and a lot more.

When it comes to implementing the notification feature in the applications, it is not that easy, and developers usually use different platforms to implement all that they need.

APNS and Firebase are two of the most used platforms. While these are the two most popular options in the world, sometimes selecting which one to use can be a difficult option for you.

So, ensure to give this article a good read so that you will know at the end which is the better option for you.

APNS Overview

APNS is Apple Push Notification Service, and it is the push notification service for the devices running on iOS.

As there are a lot of developers creating newer applications for the iOS devices, adding the push notification feature in those apps is necessary, and APNS helps these developers easily add functional push notification features in their applications.

APNS Core Features

Apple Push Notification Service comes with the following features.

Quality of Service

Apple Push Notification Service comes with a QoS or Quality of Service component responsible for the delivery of notification according to the required devices from the network. It also ensures that none of the notifications are lost or sent to the wrong device.

Store and Forward

Store and Forward is a useful feature provided by Apple Push Notification Service. It is there to ensure that all notifications are sent when a device is offline from the network. These notifications are stored and then forwarded as per the device connection status.

Coalesced Notifications

Sometimes sending similar notifications, again and again, is necessary, but it ruins the user experience. It is a feature that allows Apple Push Notification Service to collapse the identifier within the notification request, which makes similar notifications coalesced.

APNS Advantages

Apple Push Notification Service comes with a ton of features. Some of its features are:

Security Architecture

APNS comes with a next-level security architecture. Here the notifications are encrypted end-to-end, two-level authentication, Cryptographic, and using connection trust device methods. In this way, the notifications become very secure.

Provider connection trust

Apple Push Notification Service comes along as a provider to APNS connection trust to negotiate the trust for connection between the devices. It is implemented using two schemes which are:

Token-based
Certificate-based
Provisioning procedures

Instead of having different protocols and platforms for different applications related to the Apple devices, APNS comes distributed among all of the devices and apps for them that are available on the App-store.

So, whether it includes some personal usage app for phone users or enterprise-grade application for Mad devices, APNS works for all of them, and it brings a lot of value for the teams working on creating apps for all the different devices.

Read the article iOS development languages to know more how to create apps for Apple products.

Firebase Overview

As different protocols and platforms are designed and developed to ease developers’ lives and better users’ experiences, Google backed Firebase is a great choice for app development.

It brings a lot of features for web applications as well as mobile applications. With the features and solutions provided by Firebase, the development process becomes very efficient and simple.

Firebase Core Features

The following are some of the features of Firebase

Advanced message targeting

Firebase provides a lot of interesting features when it comes to notifications and messaging. It is a feature that comes with several predefined segments as well as you can create your personalized one too. It helps in targeting like never before.

Work between any devices easily.

When you are working with Firebase, you only need a device connected to the network, and you do not need to care about the type of the device. Here you can send notifications and messages across all different devices running on popular mobile and PC operating systems.

Customization

Customization of notification content with Firebase is like never before. Here you can easily customize the following things:

Time according to the time zone.
Custom data
Custom sound
Custom priorities
Expiration dates
Tracking conversation events and a lot more options.

In this way, the notifications with Firebase seem a lot more advanced as well as feature-rich.

Firebase Advantages

The following are some of the best advantages of Firebase.

All in one platform

Unlike APNs, Firebase is something that comes with everything in one package. It is an all-in-one package that provides a lot of features along with the notification feature.

Low-Code

Using Firebase notification and some other features requires no coding to low-coding. Most of the time, you can use the premade segments for adding functionality to your applications. It means that whether you are an expert or you are new to coding, you can create your application with most of the features easily integrated.

Testing easier than ever

Firebase comes with A/B testing for notifications. It makes the whole thing very easy and increases development productivity by decreasing the development time. It is an especially beneficial feature for those users who are adding a lot of customizations in their notifications using Firebase.

Conclusion

Selecting the right one between Firebase and APNS is the most important thing to enhance your development experience using your application.

So, you must make your final decision of APNS or Firebase according to your requirements. You can see what you need and decide after knowing about both services.